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Vol.  XXXI 
No.  2 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  REVIEW  PUBLICATIONS 


Whole  No.  141 
1922 


Psychological  Monographs 

EDITED  BY 

JAMES  ROWLAND  ANGELL,  Yale  University 
HOWARD  C.  WARREN,  Princeton  University  ( Review ) 

JOHN  B.  WATSON,  New  York  (7.  of  Exp.  Psychol.) 
SHEPHERD  I.  FRANZ,  Govt.  Hosp.  for  Insane  ( Bulletin )  and 
MADISON  BENTLEY,  University  of  Illinois  (Index) 


psychological  studies  from 

THE  CATHOLIC  UNIVERSITY  OF  AMERICA 


EDITED  BY 

EDWARD  A.  PACE 

Professor  of  Philosophy 

6 

Percy  Bysshe  Shelley 

An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Character 

BY 

THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


PSYCHOLOGICAL  REVIEW  COMPANY 

PRINCETON,  N.  J. 
and  LANCASTER,  PA. 


Agents:  G.  E.  STECHERT  &  CO.,  London  (2  Star  Yard,  Carey  St.,  W.  C.) 

Paris  (16,  rue  de  Conde) 


Copyrighted  by 

Thomas  Verner  Moore 

1922 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Introduction  .  i 

Chapter  I.  The  Analysis  of  Character .  6 

Chapter  II.  Shelley’s  Plan  of  Life  .  12 

Chapter  III.  Factors  in  the  Development  of  Shelley’s 

Plan  of  Life  .  19 

Chapter  IV.  Shelley’s  Father  Complex .  24 

Chapter  V.  The  Driving  Forces  in  Shelley’s  Life  ....  33 

Chapter  VI.  Hours  of  Conflict  .  40 

Chapter  VII.  The  Compensations  of  Shelley  .  47 

Chapter  VIII.  Special  Mental  Traits  .  54 

Chapter  IX.  The  Shelley  Profile .  59 

Chapter  X.  Evaluation  of  Shelley’s  Plan  of  Life  ....  60 


INTRODUCTION 

Our  English  word  character  comes  from  the  Greek 
which  meant  originally  an  instrument  for  engraving  and  stamp¬ 
ing*.  Corresponding  to  its  derivation  its  first  use  in  fourteenth 
century  English  in  the  sense  of  a  distinctive  mark,  a  brand  or 
a  stamp.  Very  early,  however,  it  acquired  the  figurative  sense  of 
a  distinctive  mental  trait.  In  the  seventeenth  century  it  was  used 
to  designate  “the  sum  of  the  moral  and  mental  qualities  which 
distinguish  an  individual  or  a  race,  viewed  as  a  homogeneous 
whole.1.  By  the  eighteenth  century  it  had  acquired  still  another 
meaning,  viz. :  “moral  qualities  strongly  developed  or  strikingly 
displayed/'  or  in  terms  of  popular  psychology,  strength  of  will. 

The  earliest  figurative  meaning  in  English  was  the  sense  in 
which  it  was  taken  by  the  first  systematic  attempt  at  a  study  of 
character.  “The  Characters"  of  Theophrastus,  the  pupil  of 
Aristotle,  is  an  attempt  to  describe  a  number  of  different  types 
of  human  beings  singled  out  by  some  one  distinctive  mark.  At 
the  same  time,  the  attempt  was  made  to  pick  out  the  other  traits 
that  are  associated  with  the  distinctive  character. 

Thus  the  surly  man  is  described  as  “one  who,  when  asked 
where  so  and  so  is,  will  say  ‘Don’t  bother  me’ ;  or,  when  spoken 
to,  will  not  reply.’’2  With  this  trait,  Theophrastus  associates  va¬ 
rious  other  attributes  such  as  the  fact  that  the  surly  man  swears 
at  the  stone  which  makes  him  stumble ;  that  he  will  not  wait  long 
for  anyone;  that  he  is  apt  not  to  pray  to  the  gods,  etc. 

The  plan  was  admirable,  but  the  goal  was  not  attained;  and 
in  spite  of  various  subsequent  attempts  it  still  remains  an  un¬ 
discovered  pole.  The  solution  is  to  be  found  not  by  accidental 
observation  of  an  occasional  association  of  traits  nor  by  the  de¬ 
lineation  of  an  imaginary  type,  but  by  an  empirical  study  of 
many  individuals  and  of  the  frequency  of  association  of  traits 
that  have  been  analysed  to  their  lowest  terms. 

1  Murray’s  English  Dictionary. 

2  The  Characters  of  Theophrastus,  translated  by  Jebb  and  Sandys.  Lon¬ 
don,  1909,  page  215. 


2 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


That  certain  elementary  character  traits  form  definite  and 
constant  groupings  is  probably  no  mere  metaphysical  dream  but 
is  rooted  in  the  physical  constitution  of  the  individual.  There 
is  indeed  a  possible  biological  foundation  for  a  law  of  association 
of  character  traits.  Heymans  and  Wiersma3  brought  forward 
some  evidence  to  show  that  certain  mental  traits  are  hereditary. 
A  working-over  of  their  data  by  two  of  Karl  Pearson's  students4 
has  shown  that  these  mental  traits  are  hereditary  in  the  same  de¬ 
gree  in  which  physical  traits  are  inherited.  Now  certain  physical 
traits  are  known  to  be  closely  associated.  This  has  been  shown 
by  Thomas  Hunt  Morgan  and  his  students;5  and  they  have  at¬ 
tributed  this  association  of  physical  traits  to  the  degree  of  close¬ 
ness  in  which  the  actual  physical  determinants  lie  in  the  chromo¬ 
somes. 

So  far  as  I  know,  the  association  of  physical  or  mental  traits 
in  man  has  not  been  adequately  studied  by  empirical  and  statisti¬ 
cal  methods.  There  has  been  much  charlatanism  in  this  field — 
especially  in  regard  to  the  association  of  mental  and  physical 
characters  maintained  by  the  Lombroso  school.  There  has  been, 
too,  a  number  of  studies  of  correlation  of  one  physical  trait  with 
another  such  as  length  of  arm  and  length  of  leg.  The  group  of 
characters  that  go  with  albinism :  nystagmus,  myopia,  pink  eye, 
etc.,  are  well  known.  But  I  know  of  no  adequate  study  of  the 
association  of  groups  of  physical  characters  in  man. 

Our  statistical  information  about  the  grouping  of  mental  char¬ 
acters  is  even  more  meagre.6  And  yet  if  the  fundamental  idea 
suggested  in  early  days  by  Theophrastus  is  true,  such  an  associa¬ 
tion  should  be  capable  of  demonstration.  Its  value,  if  it  could  be 
definitely  established  with  anything  approaching  satisfactory  com¬ 
pleteness,  would  be  inestimable.  For  if  we  could  determine  the 
presence  of  the  group  of  traits  an  individual  presents  on  the 
surface  we  could  then  infer  the  presence  of  another  group  less 

3Zeitschrift  fur  Psychologie,  vol.  42,  43,  45,  51. 

4Elderton  and  Schuster.  Biometrika,  1906-1907,  V. 

6  Cf.  e.g.  The  Mechanism  of  Mendelian  Inheritance.  By  Morgan  et  al. 

c  Joseph  Kirk  Folsom  has  made  a  preliminary  attempt.  Pedagogical  Semi¬ 
nary,  XXIV,  pp.  399-440.  Dissertation,  Columbia,  1917.  Gives  an  excellent 
bibliography. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


3 


easily  subject  to  observation.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  progress  in 
this  line  will  not  be  long  delayed. 

Thorndike  in  the  first  volume  of  his  Educational  Psychology 
has  attempted  a  complete  list  of  the  original  tendencies  of  human 
nature.  Various  studies  have  been  made  of  human  traits.7  These 
may  be  regarded  as  studies  of  character  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  seventeenth  century  definition  of  Character  as  the  sum  total 
of  the  moral  and  mental  qualities  possessed  by  an  individual. 
The  difficulty,  with  all  of  these  studies,  is  that  the  original  ten¬ 
dencies  such  as  aggressiveness,  gregariousness,  enthusiasm,  etc., 
have  not  yet  been  analyzed  to  their  lowest  elements  and  we  do 
not  really  know  their  precise  psychological  nature. 

It  is  scarcely  likely  that  we  would  get  univocal  definitions  of 
such  terms  as  “aggressiveness,”  “gregariousness,”  “enthusiasm' ’ 
from  all  psychologists.  Is  the  aggressiveness  which  makes  a  boy 
walk  around  with  a  chip  on  his  shoulder  the  same  trait  that  makes 
him  attack  an  original  problem  in  geometry  with  promptness, 
vigor  and  zest?  If  so,  is  the  labil  condition  of  the  nervous  sys¬ 
tem  to  all  stimuli  the  essential  and  elementary  character  of  ag¬ 
gressiveness  which  leads  to  a  sudden  response,  or  is  aggressive¬ 
ness  concerned  more  with  the  violence  of  the  response,  or  the 
excitement  that  assures  its  continuance  until  success  is  achieved 
or  failure  recognized?  Such  traits  need  to  be  carefully  investi¬ 
gated  and  analyzed  to  their  lowest  terms  or  until  they  may  be  so 
clearly  recognized  that  they  are  detected  with  ease  even  when 
masked  by  the  circumstances  in  which  they  may  be  masquerading. 
Until  then,  any  studies  made  on  the  assumption  of  these  as  unit 
characters  are  likely  to  suffer  the  fate  of  the  early  chemical 
writings  based  on  the  supposition  of  four  elements — earth,  air, 
fire,  and  water.  Furthermore,  the  study  of  mere  fragments  of  a 

7  Cattell.  Homo  scientificus  Americanus  (1903).  Science ,  N.  S.  XVII. 
Pp.  561-570;  Heymans  and  Wiersma.  Zeitschrift  fiir  Psychologie.  1906  ff. 
Vol.  xlii,  xliii,  xlv,  li;  C.  B.  Davenport.  The  Trait  Book,  Eugenics  Record 
Office  Bulletin,  No.  6,  1912.  Hock  and  Amsden.  A  Guide  to  the  Descriptive 
Study  of  the  Personality.  (N.  Y.)  State  Hospital  Bulletin,  Nov.  1913;  F.  W. 
Wells,  The  Systematic  Observation  of  the  Personality,  Psychol.  Rev.,  1914, 
xxi.  Pp.  295-333. 


4 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


man’s  life  leaves  much  to  be  desired  when  we  seek  to  understand 
his  behaviour  as  an  individual. 

Some  character  studies  aim  at  classification  as  the  main  goal. 
This  has  been  a  decided  tendency  among  French  authors.  It  is 
an  inheritance  which  has  descended  from  Galen  who  gave  us 
the  four  character  types :  sanguine,  choleric,  melancholic,  phleg¬ 
matic,  which  were  supposed  to  be  related  to  the  four  cardinal 
body  fluids :  blood,  yellow  gall,  mucus,  and  black  gall.  Any  at¬ 
tempt,  however,  to  classify  characters  before  the  elements  of 
character  have  been  adequately  investigated,  and  the  law  of  the 
association  of  traits  has  been  established  is  bound  to  lead  to  arti¬ 
ficial  and  unsatisfactory  results. 

In  recent  times  character  has  been  studied  from  the  psycho¬ 
analytic  point  of  view  and  psychiatrists  have  interested  them¬ 
selves  in  trying  to  investigate  the  wanderings  and  maskings  of 
the  sex  drive  and  the  interpretation  of  the  symbols  of  phantasy 
as  found  in  the  writings  of  an  author.  The  difficulty  with  these 
studies  is  that  they  leave  us  in  doubt  as  to  how  far  they  uncover 
the  analyser  himself  rather  than  the  personality  he  investigates. 
If  someone  else  than  the  original  dreamer  gives  his  associations 
with  the  figures  and  symbols  of  the  dream  and  these  are  put  to¬ 
gether  we  find  out  what  the  dream  means  to  him  who  gives  the 
associations.  What  it  meant  to  the  original  dreamer  must  remain 
a  mystery. 

If  one  confines  himself  to  the  interpretation  of  symbols,  he  is 
likely  to  be  misled.  But  if  he  looks  for  the  expression  of  ideals 
and  yearnings,  and  correlates  the  writings  of  an  author  with  the 
facts  of  his  life,  he  is  more  likely  to  analyse  the  writer  than 
merely  to  reveal  himself. 

Were  it  possible  to  bring  the  author  into  a  clinic,  and  get  his 
associations  with  various  passages  in  his  works,  much  light 
could  be  thrown  on  the  meaning  of  poetry  and  the  mechanism 
of  its  productions,  as  well  as  the  inner  drives  and  mental  mechan¬ 
isms  of  the  poet.  This  in  general  is  impossible.  But  if  one  at¬ 
tempts  to  take  his  own  associations  and  not  the  author’s  he  is 
very  likely  as  we  have  said  to  analyze  himself  instead  of  the 
poet.  The  lack  of  the  personal  associations  of  the  author  may  in 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


5 


some  measure  be  supplied  by  the  facts  of  his  biography.  The 
more  one  studies  poets  and  their  lives  the  more  one  realizes  that 
their  poetry  is  conditioned  by  the  personal  elements  of  their  inner 
experience.  Their  poetry  is  a  cryptogram  to  which  the  biography 
supplies  the  key.  The  two  together  reveal  a  human  individual  in 
his  innermost  being.  The  biographies  give  us  only  the  outer  shell. 
The  poetry  is  writen  in  a  code  that  only  those  can  understand 
who  know  the  poet. 

Studies  based  on  analysis  and  historical  investigation  are  not 
purely  psychoanalytical,  for  the  neglect  of  the  historical  is  the 
radical  sin  of  psychoanalysis.  They  may  be  termed  literary- 
historical. 

This  literary-historical  method  of  character  study  is  the  one 
that  is  here  attempted.  It  is  capable  of  revealing  many  things 
about  an  author  but  it  must  be  guided  by  a  definite  plan  if  it  is 
to  lead  to  the  understanding  of  an  individual  and  his  behavior. 
The  present  study  is  the  suggestion  of  a  plan  that  may  help  to 
this  end  and  an  illustration  is  given  in  an  analysis  of  Shelley. 


CHAPTER  I 


The  Analysis  of  Character 

Mental  traits  are  indefinitely  numerous  but  not  all  are  of  equal 
value  in  the  understanding  of  a  personality,  at  least  in  our  pres¬ 
ent  ignorance  of  the  laws  of  their  combination.  When,  there¬ 
fore,  we  would  delineate  a  mental  type  we  must  pick  out  certain 
special  traits  for  study  to  give  us  the  outline  that  we  desire. 

It  is  here  that  psychiatry  comes  to  our  assistance.  It  has  long 
been  familiar  with  the  extreme  forms  of  behavior  which  indi¬ 
viduals  manifest  under  pathological  conditions. 

But  many  psychiatrists  have  failed  to  see  that  these  extreme 
forms  of  behavior  are  only  exaggerated  types  of  normal  con¬ 
duct,  that  the  precox,  the  manic-depressive,  the  hysterical,  the 
psychasthenic,  etc.,  are  fundamentally  modes  of  reation  to  the 
difficulties  of  life  dependent  on  so  many  types  of  character.  Thus 
Kraepelin  regards  Dementia  precox  in  no  sense  of  the  word  as  a 
mode  of  reaction  which  a  certain  type  of  character  takes  in  the 
presence  of  the  difficulties  of  life  but  as  a  disease  that  may  affect 
any  individual,  whatever  his  mental  make-up,  provided  he  is  so 
unfortunate  as  to  be  subjected  to  the  influence  of  a  definite  toxine. 
This  toxine  he  looks  upon  as  produced  in  some  manner  by  a  dis¬ 
ordered  function  of  the  sex  glands.  Thus  the  thyroid  gland,  when 
stimulated  to  excessive  secretion  by  pathological  conditions,  pro¬ 
duces  a  rapid  pulse,  protruding  eyes,  a  wasting  of  tissue,  an  ab¬ 
normal  fatiguability,  an  over  prompt  and  violent  emotional  re¬ 
action  to  extraordinary  stimuli  and  incidents,  all  of  which  to¬ 
gether  give  the  peculiar  physical  and  mental  picture  of  Graves’ 
disease.  According  to  Kraepelin,  Dementia  precox  is  to  the  sex 
glands  what  Graves’  disease  is  to  the  thyroid.  And  so  with  other 
mental  disorders,  their  specific  form  according  to  him  is  depen¬ 
dent  on  some  kind  of  pathological  condition,  and  not  due  funda¬ 
mentally  and  reductively  to  the  type  of  character  which  the  indi¬ 
vidual  possesses  as  an  original  endowment. 

6 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


7 


Even  Jung  who  has  such  a  profound  insight  into  the  psycho¬ 
genic  nature  of  Dementia  precox,  said  of  it:  “Nevertheless  the 
mechanisms  of  Freud  do  not  explain  why  there  originates  a 
dementia  praecox  and  not  a  hysteria ;  hence  it  must  be  postulated 
that  for  dementia  praecox  there  is  a  specific  resultant  manifesta¬ 
tion  of  effects  (toxins?)  which  causes  the  definite  fixation  of  the 
complex  by  injuring  the  sum  total  of  psychic  functions.  How¬ 
ever,  the  possibility  cannot  be  disputed  that  the  ‘intoxication'  may 
appear  primarily  from  ‘somatic  causes’  and  seize  the  accidentally 
remaining  complex  and  change  it  pathologically.”1 

A  very  different  view  of  the  situation,  however,  is  possible, 
useful,  and  probable,  if  not  yet  satisfactorily  and  finally  estab¬ 
lished.  The  psychoneuroses  and  psychoses  are  only  exaggerated 
forms  of  normal  trends.  Dementia  precox  with  its  manifold 
subforms,  hysteria  in  its  various  manifestations,  manic-depressive 
insanity,  psychasthenia,  neurasthenia,  are  all  manifestations  of 
character  types.  An  individual  becomes  a  precox,  or  a  manic 
depressive,  not  because  he  is  infected  by  a  toxine  that  comes  from 
without  or  is  produced  by  the  disordered  functions  of  some  endo¬ 
crine  gland;  but  because  his  character  manifests  certain  types  of 
reaction  under  mental  and  physical  stresses.  It  is  because  of  the 
various  fundamental  forms  of  human  character  that  a  disease 
like  Paresis,  due  to  a  definite  toxine  secreted  in  the  brain  by  the 
spirochete  of  syphilis,  is  so  protean  in  its  manifestations.  The 
mental  picture  in  incipient  Paresis  may  simulate  any  of  the 
known  forms  of  mental  disorders.  This  fact  is  to  be  explained 
not  certainly  by  the  unity  of  the  toxine;  but  by  the  diversity  of 
native  human  dispositions. 

Every  man,  according  to  this  view,  has  his  characteristic 
trend,  precox,  or  manic-depressive,  or  hysterical,  etc.  When  in 
the  pages  to  follow  Shelley  is  termed  a  precox  this  does  not 
mean  that  he  was  so  far  deranged  that  he  should  have  been  con¬ 
fined  to  an  asylum ;  but  only  that  his  disposition  in  its  main  out¬ 
lines  resembles  that  of  precox  patients. 

These  “psychiatrical  dispositions”  are  made  up  of  elements. 

1  The  Psychology  of  Dementia  Praecox.  Eng.  Trans.  New  York  1909, 
P-  35- 


8 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


The  elements  are  not  sensory  nor  intellectual ;  but  they  are  rather 
impulsive  and  emotional  forms  of  mental  adjustment  to  the  en¬ 
vironment.  In  a  recent  article2  I  have  termed  the  normal  mental 
adjustments  of  an  individual  psychotaxes;  and  used  the  term 
parataxes  to  designate  abnormal  or  excessive  psychic  readjust¬ 
ments. 

The  dominant  psychotaxes  of  an  individual  are  the  most  char¬ 
acteristic  elements  in  his  personality.  They  tell  us  how  he  be¬ 
haves  in  the  difficulties  and  trials  of  life.  They  picture  for  us 
his  solution  to  the  riddle  of  existence  and  that  is  after  all  what 
is  most  worth  while  in  any  man’s  life.  The  final  character  is  the 
resultant  of  behavior;  and  the  dominant  trends,  which  lead  to  this 
resultant,  are  the  psychotaxes. 

These  may  be  classified  as  follows : 

I.  Psychotaxes  that  present  no  solution  for  the  mental  conflict 
which  arises  in  any  difficult  situation.  These  are  depression 
and  anxiety.  In  the  article  above  referred  to,  I  have  indi¬ 
cated  how  the  words  depression  and  anxiety  refer  not  only 
to  emotions  but  also  to  impulsive  drives.  Thus,  for  instance, 
some  people  are  not  only  sad  but  have  a  tendency  to  remain 
depressed  and  nurse  their  sorrow.  Others  again  seem  to 
experience  a  positive  drive  to  fret  over  painful  situations. 
They  are  common  modes  of  reaction,  but,  as  we  shall  see, 
were  not  dominant  in  the  character  of  Shelley. 

II.  Psychotaxes  that  present  some  solution  for  a  difficult  situa¬ 
tion. 

i.  The  defense  reactions.  E.g.  trying  to  forget  and  keep 
the  whole  affair  out  of  mind.  Retiring  from  the  ivorld 
and  shutting  oneself  up  in  the  castle  of  one’s  mind.  In¬ 
capacitation  either  general,  as  in  neurasthenia;  or  special 
hysterical  disabilities,  such  as,  a  functional  paralysis,  or 
deafness,  or  convulsive  seizures,  etc.  Avoiding  the  reali¬ 
zation  of  personal  blamie  by  a  high  sense  of  personal 
righteousness,  or  accusing  or  suspecting  others,  or  de¬ 
veloping  delusions  of  persecution. 

2  Psychoanalytic  Review.  July  1921 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


9 


2.  The  compensations  and  sublimations. 

Compensation  is  the  opening  of  channels  of  satisfaction 
of  a  similar  but  not  a  higher  nature  than  that  which  was 
blocked  and  thwarted.  If  channels  of  a  higher  symbolic 
nature  are  opened  the  reaction  is  termed  a  sublimation. 
Compensations  are  sometimes  trivial,  such  as,  the 
theatre,  novel  reading,  physical  exercise;  or  of  major 
character,  such  as,  transfer  of  affection,  appeal  for  sym¬ 
pathy,  etc.  Religion  and  social  work  may  be  looked  upon 
as  the  main  channels  of  sublimation. 

Some  sit  down  and  think  a  situation  over  and  see  what  can 
and  ought  to  be  done  and  then  set  out  to  make  the  most  of  it. 
This  is  a  rational  readjustment  and  not  a  psychotaxis;  for  the 
psychotaxes  are  blind  impulsive  drives,  involuntary,  and  depen¬ 
dent  to  a  large  extent  on  native  disposition. 

To  study  out  the  modes  of  readjustment  of  an  individual  is 
an  essential  step  in  analysing  his  behavior.  They  are  manifested 
in  his  hours  of  conflict.  Find  out  what  one  does  in  these  mo¬ 
ments,  and  you  will  discover  the  main  currents  in  his  conscious 
and  sub-conscious  life. 

In  many  people  some  unpleasant  emotional  experience  of  child¬ 
hood  reverberates  through  their  whole  life.  Sometimes  they  have 
forgotten  it;  or,  at  least,  are  not  aware  of  the  relationship  between 
this  early  experience  and  their  later  behavior.  Such  an  emotion¬ 
al  experience  is  termed  a  complex.  It  is  a  very  important  ele¬ 
ment  in  understanding  a  person's  behavior  and  should  always  be 
searched  for  and,  if  in  any  way  possible,  detected.  It  is  be¬ 
trayed  by  those  things  towards  which  he  manifests  a  strong 
emotional  reaction  of  hatred  or  disgust.  It  associates  itself  with 
other  elements  of  a  kindred  logical  nature,  or  with  which  it  has 
been  merely  in  contact  in  the  individual’s  early  experience.  In 
Shelley  as  we  shall  see  the  dominating  complex  was  the  unpleas¬ 
antness  of  his  relation  to  his  father,  commenced  in  childhood, 
deepened,  and  intensified  in  manhood. 

Man,  however,  is  more  than  a  reflex  machine.  He  has  an  in¬ 
tellectual  as  well  as  an  emotional  and  impulsive  life.  He,  there¬ 
fore,  develops  an  intellectual  plan  of  life,  a  theory  of  existence, 


10 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


a  general  viewpoint  that  shows  him  what  he  wants  to  get  out  of 
life. 

The  following  analysis  of  Shelley  is  presented  as  a  kind  of 
schematic  attempt  to  study  a  human  character  from  the  individu¬ 
al’s  life  and  writings.  It  commences  with  the  plan  of  life  the 
ideal  or  group  of  ideals  that  shimmer  on  the  outskirts  of  one’s 
mental  vision  and  determine  the  general  trend  of  activity.  The 
plan  of  life  is  always  present.  It  is  of  fundamental  importance 
in  determining  the  general  tone  of  character,  but  it  has  been 
heretofore  neglected  in  most  analyses  of  the  human  personality. 

Alfred  Adler,  however,  in  his  work  on  “The  Neurotic  Consti¬ 
tution"  has  recognized  the  importance  of  what  he  terms  the 
“imaginary  goal  of  life"  or  the  “accentuated  fiction’’  or  at  times 
the  plan  of  life.  In  fact  he  recognizes  in  the  neurotic  a  double 
plan  of  life:  one  unconscious  and  not  in  accord  with  the  estab¬ 
lished  principles  of  social  morality  and  the  other  conscious  and 
sanctioned  by  ethics  and  society.  If  the  two  are  harmonized, 
normal  behavior  results;  if  the  conscious  plan  meets  with  ship¬ 
wreck,  the  unconscious  carries  the  unfortunate  individual  away 
from  reality  into  the  barren  wastes  of  a  psychosis.  Shelley  had 
a  conscious  plan  of  life.  It  would  be  also  possible  to  distinguish 
a  second  plan  with  unconscious  elements  in  his  violent  protest 
against  authority,  law  and  order  rooted  unknown  to  himself  in 
the  hatred  of  his  father.  Instead  of  so  doing  we  have  considered 
the  plan  of  life  as  composed  of  conscious  elements  only  and  the 
unconscious  factors  which  constitute  what  Adler  would  term  the 
“anti-fiction"  have  been  taken  up  under  the  term  of  the  complex. 

The  study,  therefore,  proceeds  in  the  next  place  to  a  determina¬ 
tion  of  the  fundamental  complex,  a  concept  for  the  understand¬ 
ing  of  whose  importance  we  are  indebted  to  Jung.  The  attempt 
is  then  made  to  analyse  the  driving  forces  in  Shelley’s  life  de¬ 
termining  not  only  his  actions  but  also  the  plots  of  his  poems. 
His  mental  adjustments  are  studied  in  his  hours  of  conflict,  and 
his  ordinary  compensations.  Finally  we  come  to  what  has  often 
constituted  the  sum  total  of  a  character  study — the  special  mental 
traits.  These  traits  are  not  analyzed  to  their  lowest  terms — a 
task  that  could  only  be  accomplished  by  the  study  and  comparison 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


ii 


of  many  individuals.  Such  a  comparative  study  alone  could  also 
give  us  the  law  of  association  of  mental  traits — the  value  of 
which  we  have  already  indicated. 

It  will  be  seen,  however,  that  the  plan  of  life,  the  complex, 
the  driving  forces,  the  mental  adjustments  give  us  that  which 
is  most  valuable  in  the  study  of  any  character,  namely,  an  in¬ 
sight  into  a  human  being’s  peculiar  difficulties  in  life  and  his 
contribution  to  the  solution  of  the  riddle  of  existence. 


CHAPTER  II 


Shelley’s  Plan  of  Life 

That  a  man  should  consciously  or  unconsciously  have  a  plan 
of  life  is  an  inherent  mental  necessity.  He  has  capacities  of  en¬ 
joyment  both  sensory  and  intellectual;  and  nature,  nurture,  and 
opportunity  develop  these  along  various  lines.  From  the  very 
multitude  of  his  capacities  and  the  manifold  blocks  to  their  un¬ 
hampered  realization  arises  the  essential  impossibility  of  satisfy¬ 
ing  them  all,  and  so  a  conflict  of  desires  is  unavoidable.  Out  of 
this  conflict  issues  a  consciously  or  unconsciously  accepted  plan 
of  life  and  to  know  this  plan  is  very  important  in  obtaining  a 
general  view  of  any  man's  character.  It  is  likely  that  types  of 
plans  correspond  to  types  of  character. 

Not  only  is  the  type  of  plan  characteristic,  but  also  the  way 
in  which  it  is  adopted.  A  rational  and  cold  calculating  consider¬ 
ation  of  the  future  is  one  type.  A  blind  emotional  drive  is  an¬ 
other.  It  is  this  latter  that  characterizes  Shelley.  His  plan  of 
life  was  a  reaction  to  difficulties  experienced  in  childhood,  and 
not  a  mode  of  action  adopted  after  the  consideration  of  the  pos¬ 
sibilities  life  held  out  before  him.  Shelley's  way  is  perhaps  the 
common  way — but  on  this  point  there  is,  so  far  as  I  know,  no 
statistical  evidence. 

In  the  dedication  to  The  Revolt  of  Islam  he  has  outlined  this 
plan  and  indicated  the  influences  which  led  to  its  adoption. 

Ill 

Thoughts  of  great  deeds  were  mine,  dear  friend,  when  first 
The  clouds  which  wrap  this  world  from  youth  did  pass. 

I  do  remember  well  the  hour  which  burst 
My  spirit’s  sleep.  A  fresh  May-dawn  it  was, 

When  I  walked  forth  upon  the  glittering  grass, 

And  wept,  I  knew  not  why :  until  there  rose 
From  the  near  schoolroom  voices  that,  alas! 

Were  but  the  echo  from  a  world  of  woes — 

The  harsh  and  grating  strife  of  tyrants  and  of  foes. 

12 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


o 


13 


IV 

And  then  I  clasped  my  hands,  and  looked  around ; 

But  none  was  near  to  mock  my  streaming  eyes, 

Which  poured  their  warm  drops  on  the  sunny  ground. 

So,  without  shame,  I  spake : — “I  will  be  wise, 

And  just,  and  free,  and  mild,  if  in  me  lies 

Such  power;  for  I  grow  weary  to  behold 
The  selfish  and  the  strong  still  tyrannize 

Without  reproach  or  check.”  I  then  controlled 
My  tears,  my  heart  grew  calm,  and  I  was  meek  and  bold. 

V 

And  from  that  hour  did  I  with  earnest  thought 
Heap  knowledge  from  forbidden  mines  of  lore; 

Yet  nothing  that  my  tyrants  knew  or  taught 
I  cared  to  learn — but  from  that  secret  store 
Wrought  linked  armour  for  my  soul,  before 

It  might  walk  forth  to  war  among  mankind. 

Thus  power  and  hope  were  strengthened  more  and  more 

Within  me;  till  there  came  upon  my  mind 
A  sense  of  loneliness,  a  thirst  with  which  I  pined. 

Analysing  this  passage  into  the  elements  of  his  plan  of  life  we 
find  the  following : 

(1)  I  will  be  wise,  but  with  a  wisdom  which  comes  from  hid¬ 
den  stores  of  learning.  I  shall  despise  the  wisdom  of  the  tyrants 
who  teach  me  and  seek  knowledge  by  ways  and  means  which  they 
will  regard  with  horror. 

What  does  he  mean  here  by  the  forbidden  mines  of  lore?  Med- 
win  in  his  biography  (p.  24)  tells  us  how  he  took  special  delight 
in  reading  the  sixpence  “blue  books”  with  their  “stories  of 
haunted  castles,  bandits,  murderers.”  This  led  him  on  to  magic 
and  spiritism,  and  Rossetti  tells  us  (Vol.  I,  p.  xxxvi)  “that  he 
'went  in  for’  ghosts  and  fiends  with  a  real  eye  to  business :  he 
studied  the  occult  sciences,  watched  for  spectres,  conjured  the 
devil,  and  speculated  on  a  visit  to  Africa  for  the  purpose  of 
searching  out  the  magic  arcana  which  her  dusky  populations  are 
noted  for.”  Traces  of  this  occult  lore  are  to  be  found  in  his 
writings  and  to  it  may  be  ascribed  the  character  of  Demogorgon 
who  occupies  so  prominent  a  place  in  Prometheus  Unbound. 


14 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


Though  in  his  childish  ideas  this  occult  lore  held  the  first  place, 
in  the  actual  realization  of  his  plan  it  faded  much  in  importance 
and  yielded  to  the  second  which  became  the  dominant  motif  in 
his  life  and  writings. 

(2)  The  second  factor  is  not  expressly  brought  out  but  is  re¬ 
ferred  to  in  the  words  “For  I  grow  weary  to  behold  the  selfish 
and  the  strong  still  tyrannize  without  reproach  or  check/’  He 
was  not  only  weary  of  beholding  it  but  there  is  abundant  evidence 
which  we  shall  consider  presently,  that  oppression  was  the  funda¬ 
mental  complex  of  his  life.  It  dominated  his  thoughts  more  than 
anything  else,  leading  to  a  tremendous  over-compensation  that 
manifested  itself  in  the  rejection  of  authority  and  a  delight  in 
shocking  the  sensibilities  of  all  those  who  might  be  cast  in  the 
stereotyped  mould  of  social  sanctions  and  customs. 

(3)  The  third  factor  “I  will  be  wise,  and  just,  and  free,  and 
mild  if  in  me  lies.” 

Shelley  undoubtedly  built  himself  an  ideal  of  a  perfect  man. 
Byron  said  of  him  “He  had  formed  to  himself  a  beau  ideal  of  all 
that  is  fine,  highminded,  and  noble,  and  he  acted  up  to  this  ideal 
even  to  the  very  letter.”1  The  last  words,  if  true  at  all,  mean 
rather  that  he  thought  he  did.  In  considering  his  conflict  and 
defense  reactions  we  shall  see  that  Shelley  was  one  of  those  who 
in  his  own  estimation  was  like  the  king  who  can  do  no  wrong. 
His  ideal,  furthermore,  was  fashioned  to  suit  his  inner  drives 
and  never  resulted  in  any  moral  conflict  or  painful  struggle  to 
maintain  his  standard  of  conduct. 

The  fragment  on  Prince  Athanase  portrays  this  ideal  of  a 
perfect  gentleman : 

Not  his  the  load  of  any  secret  crime, 

For  nought  of  ill  his  heart  could  understand. 

•  •  f  •  •  •  • 

ii 

Not  his  the  thirst  for  glory  or  command 
Nor  evil  joys  which  fire  the  vulgar  breast 
For  none  than  he  a  purer  heart  could  have 


1  Quoted  by  Rossetti,  I,  p.  Ixxxv. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


15 


Or  that  loved  good  more  for  itself  alone. 

•  ••••• 

His  soul  had  wedded  Wisdom  and  her  dower 
Is  love  and  justice;  clothed  in  which  he  sate 
Apart  from  men,  as  in  a  lonely  tower, 

Pitying  the  tumult  of  their  dark  estate. 

(4)  In  the  last  line  of  the  quotation  from  The  Revolt  of  Islam 
Shelley  speaks  of  “A  sense  of  loneliness,  a  thirst  with  which  I 
pined. ”  This  thirst  was  the  craving  for  the  affection  of  one  who 
could  understand.  He  tells  us  in  the  next  stanza  how  he  sought 
this  one  in  vain.  He  refers  to  his  life  with  Harriet. 

x\las  that  love  should  be  a  blight  and  snare 
To  those  who  seek  all  sympathies  in  one! — 

Such  once  I  sought  in  vain.  Then  black  despair, 

The  shadow  of  a  starless  night,  was  thrown 
Over  the  world  in  which  I  moved  alone.” 

He  then  tells  how  all  were  false  to  him  till  Mary  came. 

Yet  never  found  I  one  not  false  to  me, 

Hard  hearts  and  cold,  like  weights  of  icy  stone 
Which  crushed  and  withered  mine — that  could  not  be 
Aught  but  a  lifeless  clod,  until  revived  by  thee. 

Wisdom  and  justice  and  the  warfare  against  tyranny  were  not 
enough  to  satisfy  the  romantic  heart  of  Shelley.  He  must  have 
some  one  who  could  understand  his  aspirations  and  to  whom  he 
could  communicate  his  ideals.  The  search  for  this  ideal  woman 
was  the  dominant  positive  driving  force  of  his  nature. 

His  poem  Alastor  is  his  autobiography  describing  a  poet’s 
search  but  failure  to  find  the  ideal  woman  that  his  nature  craved. 
The  autobiographic  character  of  the  poem  is  expressly  mentioned 
in  the  apostrophe  to  the  river  on  which  Alastor  sailed. 

O  stream, 

Whose  source  is  inaccessibly  profound, 

Whither  do  thy  mysterious  waters  tend  ? 

Thou  imagest  my  life.  Thy  darksome  stillness, 

Thy  dazzling  waves,  thy  loud  and  hollow  gulfs, 

Thy  searchless  fountain  and  invisible  course, 

Have  each  their  type  in  me. 


i6 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


In  the  preface  he  says:  “The  poem  entitled  Alastor  may  be 
considered  as  allegorical  of  one  of  the  most  interesting  situa¬ 
tions  of  the  human  mind.  It  represents  a  youth  of  uncorrupted 
feelings  and  adventurous  genius,  led  forth  by  an  imagination  in¬ 
flamed  and  purified  through  familiarity  with  all  that  is  excellent 
and  majestic,  to  the  contemplation  of  the  universe.  He  drinks 
deep  of  the  fountains  of  knowledge  and  is  still  insatiate.  The 
magnificence  and  beauty  of  the  external  world  sinks  profoundly 
into  the  frame  of  his  conceptions,  and  affords  to  their  modifica¬ 
tion  a  variety  not  to  be  exhausted.  So  long  as  it  is  possible  for 
his  desires  to  point  towards  objects  thus  infinite  and  unmeasured, 
he  is  joyous  and  tranquil  and  self-possessed.  But  the  period  ar¬ 
rives  when  these  objects  cease  to  suffice.2  His  mind  is  at  length 
suddenly  awakened  and  thirsts  for  intercourse  with  an  intelli¬ 
gence  similar  to  himself.  He  images  to  himself  the  being  whom 
he  loves.  .  .  .  He  seeks  in  vain  for  a  prototype  of  his  concep¬ 
tion.  Blasted  by  his  disappointment  he  descends  to  an  untimely 
grave.” 

His  pining  away  and  dying  of  disappointed  love  was  much 
overdrawn,  for  the  poem  is  to  a  large  extent  an  unconscious  ap¬ 
peal  for  sympathy.  It  is  indeed  an  expression  of  his  libido  drive, 
but  it  is  also  an  apology  for  his  desertion  of  Harriet  and  his 
gypsy  life  with  Mary.  If  his  very  life  depended  on  deserting 
Harriet  and  living  with  Mary,  then  the  world  would  perhaps  look 
more  kindly  on  a  deed  which  drove  his  true  wife  to  suicide. 

The  poem  describes  an  Arab  maiden  who,  like  the  personalities 
of  a  dream,  is  a  composite  photograph.  She  is  Harriet  for  she 
cannot  understand;  she  brings  him  food  from  her  father’s  home 
as  Harriet  brought  him  his  sisters’  savings  when  his  father  ex¬ 
pelled  him  from  home.  She  is  also  an  imaginary  person  whom 
Shelley  dreamed  of  as  following  him  and  watching  him  herself 
unseen  on  the  lake  of  Geneva.3  And  so  the  Arab  maid  “Watches 
his  nightly  sleep,  sleepless  to  gaze  upon  his  lips  parted  in  slumber.” 

The  Arab  maid  had  no  attraction  for  him.  She  was  no  poet. 

2  He  experiences  the  same  inadequacy  that  Francis  Thompson  experienced 
in  his  love  of  nature. 

8  Cf.  Rossetti  on  this  imaginary  personality — Memoir  in  the  poetical  Works, 
1870.  I,  pp.  lxxxii-lxxxiii. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


1 7 


Like  Harriet  she  could  not  understand.  And  so  in  his  dream  he 
pictures  to  himself  an  ideal  woman. 

He  dreamed  a  veiled  maid 
Sate  near  him,  talking  in  low  solemn  tones. 

Her  voice  was  like  the  voice  of  his  own  soul 
Heard  in  the  calm  of  thought;  its  music  long, 

Like  woven  sounds  of  streams  and  breezes,  held 
His  inmost  sense  suspended  in  its  web 
Of  many-coloured  woof  and  shifting  hues. 

Knowledge  and  truth  and  virtue  were  her  theme, 

And  lofty  hopes  of  divine  liberty, 

Thoughts  the  most  dear  to  him,  and  poesy, 

Himself  a  poet. 

Jfc  sfc  *  *  *  * 

Nor  blackness  veiled  his  dizzy  eyes,  and  night 
Involved  and  swallowed  up  the  vision ;  sleep, 

Like  a  dark  flood  suspended  in  its  course, 

Rolled  back  its  impulse  on  his  vacant  brain. 

Shelley  outlines  here  his  dominant  ideal,  wisdom  and  sensuous 
beauty  united  in  the  one  woman  who  understands  him  and  ex¬ 
presses  his  poetic  ideals  so  perfectly  that  “her  voice  is  like  the 
voice  of  his  own  soul  heard  in  the  calm  of  thought”  and  so 

He  eagerly  pursues 

Beyond  the  realms  of  dream  that  fleeting  shade; 

He  overleaps  the  bounds. 

He  searches  the  lands,  he  traverses  the  seas,  led  by  the  fetish 
of  his  love, 


two  eyes, 

Two  starry  eyes,  hung  in  the  gloom  of  thought, 

And  seemed  with  their  serene  and  azure  smiles 
To  beckon  him. 

And  so  he  ever  seeks,  but  finds  not;  and  the  starry  eyes  fade 
to  two  lessening  points  of  light  gleaming  through  the  darkness 
and  Alastor  dies. 


i8 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


No  sense,  no  motion,  no  divinity — 

A  fragile  lute,  on  whose  harmonious  strings 

The  breath  of  heaven  did  wander — a  bright  stream 

Once  fed  with  many-voiced  waves  (a  dream 

Of  youth  which  night  and  time  have  quenched  for  ever), 

Still,  dark,  and  dry,  and  unremembered  now. 

Here  then  is  Shelley’s  plan  of  life  to  know  the  charm  of  hidden 
lore,  live  out  the  thoughts  and  actions  of  a  prince’s  high  nobility, 
to  war  against  tyranny  and  to  know  one  who  understands  him¬ 
self,  sees  into  his  very  soul  and  loves  him  with  a  sensuous  love. 
And  then?  After  that  there  is  nothing. 

He  will  awake  no  more,  oh  never  more ! 

Within  the  twilight  chamber  spreads  apace 
The  shadow  of  white  Death,  and  at  the  door 
Invisible  Corruption  waits  to  trace 
His  extreme  way  to  her  dim  dwelling-place. 

Adonais  VIII. 


CHAPTER  III 


Factors  in  the  Development  of  Shelley’s  Plan  of  Life 

In  Shelley’s  plan  of  life  we  find  two  elements:  a  drive  and  a 
protest.  The  drive  has  in  it  two  components,  one  affective  and 
the  other  intellectual. 

The  affective  drive  is  for  an  object  of  sensuous  love  which 
must  at  the  same  time  be  capable  of  understanding  and  harmon¬ 
izing  with  his  intellectual  ideals.  This  I  have  termed  above  the 
dominant  positive  driving  force  of  his  nature.  It  is  rooted  in 
human  nature  and  needs  no  other  explanation  than  humanity  it¬ 
self.  Humanum  est  amare.  Love  is  an  ineradicable  impulse 
of  human  nature  and  its  presence  is  to  be  assumed  and  expected, 
needing  no  cumbersome  teaching  of  psychoanalysis  for  its  demon¬ 
stration.  Its  mode  of  satisfaction  differs  in  various  individuals. 
It  is,  however,  only  one  way  in  which  an  indivdual  seeks  an  outlet 
for  the  energy  of  his  personality  and  it  need  not  be  aimed  at  the 
sensual  ideal  that  hovered  before  the  mind  of  Shelley. 

The  intellectual  drive  took  a  form  that  was  colored  by  the 
protest.  Shelley  yearned  to  know,  but  the  object  of  knowledge 
must  be  forbidden  lore.  He  had  intellectual  ideals,  but  they  must 
be  such  as  would  come  in  conflict  with  traditional  concepts.  Con¬ 
flict,  to  him,  was  a  greater  desideratum  than  objective  evidence. 
Knowledge  for  its  own  sake  was  not  a  vigorous  drive  in  the  mind 
of  Shelley.  He  sought  to  know  what  the  world  disregarded. 
This  was  in  fact  an  element  of  his  precox  constitution.  The 
precox  holds  aloof  from  the  common  run.  He  has  no  desire  to 
be  “in  the  swim,”  but  off  in  a  little  nook  by  himself.  Thus  Prince 
Athanase  wedded  Wisdom 

clothed  in  which  he  sate 
Apart  from  men,  as  in  a  lonely  tower, 

Pitying  the  tumult  of  their  dark  estate. 

And  so  Shelley  lived  in  Italy  rather  than  in  England,  his  native 
land;  he  studied  Italian,  Spanish,  Greek,  Arabic,  not  for  prac- 

19 


20 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


tical  needs,  but  that  he  might  live  on  in  his  lonely  tower,  unlike 
the  rest  of  mankind,  pitying  the  strong  activity  of  the  common, 
ordinary,  ignorant  rabble.  At  present  I  cannot  refer  the  shut  in 
reaction  type  of  the  precox  disposition  to  anything  else  than 
native  constitution.  All  minds  have  this  type  of  reaction  in  a 
greater  or  less  degree,  but  in  the  precox,  it  manifests  itself  un¬ 
checked  and  unbalanced  and  so  he  is  very  different  from  the  hypo- 
manic  who  frequents  the  street  corners  and  the  “movies.” 

The  love  of  that  which  the  world  merely  disregards  does  not 
by  any  means  adequately  describe  Shelley’s  intellectual  ideal.  He 
loved  knowledge  upon  which  the  sanctions  of  established  opinion 
frowns  down  with  disapproval.  He  sought  to  develop  ideals 
and  principles  which  would  be  subversive  of  all  that  is  looked 
upon  as  lawfully  constituted  authority.  Why  was  this?  It  was 
because  of  the  negative  element  of  his  precox  character,  the  pro¬ 
test;  and  the  explanation  is  to  be  sought  in  the  origin  of  Shelley’s 
insurrection  against  authority. 

This  dates  back  to  childhood.  Of  the  very  early  incidents  of 
Shelley’s  life  we  have  but  little  information.  Helen  Shelley’s 
letters  in  Hogg’s  Life  give  us  a  great  wealth  of  anecdote.  She 
passes  over  in  silence,  however,  the  relations  between  Shelley  and 
his  father.  This  may  be  because  these  relations  were  unpleasant. 
By  the  time,  however,  that  Shelley  got  to  Eton  there  was  evi¬ 
dently  no  tender  feeling  of  filial  affection  but  an  outspoken  hate 
and  defiance.  Rossetti  tells  us  that  “he  was  known  among  his 
schoolfellows  for  a  habit  of  ‘cursing  his  father  and  the  king’  ”x 
and  that  he  bestowed  upon  his  father  such  nicknames  as  “Old 
Buck”  and  “Killjoy.” 

Before  his  Eton  days  he  had  come  into  conflict  with  authority 
and  his  school-mates  at  Sion  House.  Medwin,  a  cousin,  one  of 
his  biographers,  was  one  of  the  older  boys  when  Shelley  came  to 
this  school.  Hogg  says  that  he  entered  there  at  the  age  of  ten. 
Medwin  points  out  that  these  days  were  so  unhappy,  that  they 
never  spoke  of  them  in  after  life.  Shelley  seems  to  have  been 
cruelly  persecuted  by  the  fagging  of  the  older  boys  and  to  have 
been  misunderstood  and  mistreated  by  his  masters.  Medwin  is 


1  Memoir,  p.  xxviii. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


21 


authority  for  the  following  amusing  incident.  He  had  to  com¬ 
pose  two  lines  of  Latin  poetry  on  a  storm,  so  he  came  to  Medwin 
for  assistance.  His  older  cousin  pilfered  from  Ovid  the  fol¬ 
lowing  distich, — 

Me  miserum!  quanti  montes  volvuntur  aquarum! 

Jam,  jam  tacturas  sidera  summa  putes. 

“When  Shelley’s  turn  came  to  carry  up  his  exercise,  my  eyes,” 
says  Medwin,  “turned  upon  the  Dominie.  There  was  a  peculiar 
expression  in  his  features,  which,  like  the  lightning  before  the 
storm  portended  what  was  coming.  The  spectacles,  generally 
lifted  above  his  dark  and  bushy  brows,  were  lowered  to  their 
proper  position,  and  their  lenses  had  no  sooner  caught  the  said 
hexameter  and  pentameter  than  he  said  with  a  loud  voice,  laying 
a  sarcastic  emphasis  on  every  word,  and  suiting  the  action  to  the 
word  by  boxes  on  each  side  of  Shelley’s  ears.  Then  came  the 
comment,  “Jam,  jam, — Pooh,  pooh,  boy!  raspberry  jam!  Do 
you  think  you  are  at  your  mother’s?”  Here  a  burst  of  laughter 
echoed  through  the  listening  benches.  “Don’t  you  know  that  I 
have  a  sovereign  objection  to  those  two  monosyllables,  with  which 
schoolboys  cram  their  verses?  Haven’t  I  told  you  so  a  hundred 
times  already?  ‘Tacturos  sidera  celsa  putes ’2  what,  do  the  waves 
on  the  coast  of  Sussex  strike  the  stars,  eh?  .  .  .  c celsa  sidera ’ 
.  .  .  who  does  not  know  that  the  stars  are  high?  Where  did 
you  find  that  epithet  ?  ...  in  your  Gradus  ad  Parnassum,  I  sup¬ 
pose.  You  will  never  mount  so  high”;  (another  box  on  the  ears 
which  nearly  felled  him  to  the  ground)  .  .  .  “putes!  You  may 
think  this  very  fine,  but  to  me  it  is  all  balderdash,  hyperbolical 
stuff”;  (another  cuff)  after  which  he  tore  up  the  verses  and  said 
in  a  fury,  “There,  go  now,  sir,  and  see  if  you  can’t  write  some¬ 
thing  better.” 

It  is  worth  noting,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  Adlerian  over¬ 
compensation  theory,  that  this  child,  only  a  little  over  ten,3  re- 

2  Medwin  wrote  from  memory  and  misquoted  the  line.  See  note  p.  22, 
Forman’s  edition  of  his  Life  of  Shelley.  Oxford,  1913. 

3  He  had  been  forced  to  commence  his  Latin  studies,  when  only  six,  with 
a  clergyman  in  the  neighborhood  of  his  home. 


22 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


acted  to  this  incident  by  excelling  in  Latin  poetry  while  at  school 
and  devoting  his  whole  life  to  poetic  compositions. 

At  the  same  time  this  and  similar  experiences  made  him  despise 
and  hate  authority.  “Nothing  that  my  tyrants  knew  or  taught 
I  cared  to  learn.”  “I  will  be  wise  and  just  and  free  and  mild  as 
in  me  lies,”  “for  I  grow  weary  to  behold  the  selfish  and  the  strong 
still  tyrannize  without  reproach  or  check.”  His  unsympathetic 
father  who  placed  him  in  Sion  Hall,  his  domineering  school 
mates,  his  unjust,  ignorant,  and  tyrannical  masters,  and  all  the 
authority  that  they  represented  in  Church  or  in  State  were  in¬ 
volved  in  the  protest  of  his  whole  being  against  authority.  So 
that  when  he  left  Sion  Hall  and  went  to  Eton  he  was  already  an 
Atheist  and  cursed  his  father  and  the  king. 

At  Eton,  Shelley  waged  continual  warfare  against  authority 
but  to  a  large  extent  by  mere  boyish  pranks  calculated  to  tease 
and  annoy  his  masters.  According  to  Rossetti  he  was  probably 
expelled  for  some  offense  the  nature  of  which  is  not  known. 

In  1810  he  went  to  Oxford  where  he  met  Hogg.  Here  he 
gave  expression  to  his  anti-religious  views  in  a  pamphlet,  on 
which  his  friend  Hogg  was  collaborator,  and  which  they  pub¬ 
lished  anonymously  under  the  title  of  The  Necessity  of  Atheism . 
He  was  expelled  for  refusing  to  deny  the  authorship  of  the 
brochure.  Hogg  wrote  a  note  of  protest  and  on  being  interro¬ 
gated  and  declining  to  reply  was  also  expelled. 

His  father  insisted  that  he  should  break  off  his  friendship  with 
Hogg  and  on  his  refusal  not  only  closed  the  doors  of  his  home 
to  him  but  refused  to  give  him  a  single  penny  of  support.  His 
sisters  aided  him  by  saving  up  their  pocket  money  and  sending 
it  to  him  by  Harriet  Westbrook,  a  young  girl  whom  he  finally 
fell  in  love  with  and  married.  His  father  ever  afterwards  re¬ 
mained  relentless  and  never  gave  his  son  an  allowance  until  cir¬ 
cumstances  forced  a  legal  settlement. 

Shelley’s  life  exemplifies  the  eternal  tragedy  of  tyranny  and 
rebellion — the  blind  unreasonableness  of  domineering  and  un¬ 
sympathetic  authority  and  the  reaction  of  the  oppressed  by  a 
logically  unjustifiable  but  psychologically  explicable  all-embrac¬ 
ing  revolt.  Shelley’s  father  and  his  tactless,  domineering  masters 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


23 


welded  a  pathological  association  in  his  mind  between  authority 
and  all  that  can  be  connected  with  it  or  that  it  stands  for  and  the 
unhappy  experience  of  his  childhood  and  youth. 

Let  those  who  deal  with  the  minds  of  children  learn  a  lesson 
from  the  life  of  Shelley. 


CHAPTER  IV 


Shelley’s  Father  Complex 

The  cardinal  complex  in  Shelley’s  life  thus  became  the  tyranny 
of  an  irreconcilable  father.  Shelley  gives  expression  to  this  com¬ 
plex  and  revenges  himself  upon  his  father  in  The  Cenci.  He 
himself  appears  in  this  tragedy  as  Giacomo  who  is  endeavoring, 
as  Shelley  did  in  reality,  to  seek  a  law  by  which  he  could  force 
his  father  to  settle  something  upon  him.  Giacomo  the  first  born 
son,  as  Shelley  himself  was,  complains  (Act  II,  Scene  ii,  lines 
10-13)  that 

The  eldest  son  of  a  rich  nobleman 

Is  heir  to  all  his  incapacities; 

He  has  wide  wants,  and  narrow  powers.  .  .  . 

This  is  only  a  picture  of  Shelley  himself  at  war  with  his  father 
and  relentlessly  cut  off  without  a  proper  allowance. 

When  in  a  dream  one  pictures  a  person  against  whom  the 
dreamer  has  a  grudge  it  is  much  overdrawn,  and  base  emotions 
and  criminal  acts  are  often  imputed  which  have  no  basis  in  re¬ 
ality  and  the  dreamer  knows  that  they  have  not.  And  so  in 
Shelley’s  tragedy  the  old  Count  Franceso  Cenci  appears  as  a 
monster  of  cruelty  who  celebrates  the  death  of  his  sons  with  a 
banquet,  imprisons  his  daughter  and  finally  rapes  her. 

But  Shelley  is  not  content  with  these  dream  accusations  against 
his  father.  He  kills  him;  making  his  own  daughter  rise  up 
against  him  and  plot  his  murder. 

Unlike  Oedippus  Tyrannus,  we  do  not  find  any  of  Shelley’s 
personages  marrying  his  mother.  Shelley’s  father  complex  is 
therefore  to  be  distinguished  from  the  Oedipus  complex  of  the 
psychoanalysts.  When  incest  appears  in  Shelley  it  is  between 
brother  and  sister  not  between  son  and  mother.  Shelley’s  letters 
to  his  mother  or  his  reference  to  her  in  other  letters  are  rather 
cold.  Once  he  boasts  of  the  liberality  of  her  opinions.  But  one 

24 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


25 


looks  in  vain  for  even  the  ordinary  expressions  of  tender  feelings 
towards  his  mother.  Shelley  hated  his  father  because  of  his 
harshness.  And  this  dates,  as  we  have  seen,  from  a  rather  early 
age.  The  difficulties  of  childhood  were  but  increased  in  later 
years  and  his  father  was  harsh  and  unrelenting  after  Shelley 
was  finally  expelled  from  Oxford  and  later  married  a  tavern 
keeper’s  daughter.  It  is  this  feud  that  dominated  Shelley’s  mind 
in  the  composition  of  the  Cenci. 

It  is  his  own  father  against  whom  he  vents  his  spleen  when  he 
writes : 

He  has  cast  Nature  off  which  was  his  shield, 

And  nature  casts  him  off,  who  is  her  shame; 

And  I  spurn  both.  Is  it  a  father’s  throat 
Which  I  will  shake  ?  and  say,  “I  ask  not  gold  ; 

I  ask  not  happy  years;  nor  memories 
Of  tranquil  childhood;  nor  home-sheltered  love; 

Though  all  these  hast  thou  torn  from  me,  and  more; — 

But  only  my  fair  fame ;  only  one  hoard 
Of  peace,  which  I  thought  hidden  from  thy  hate, 

Under  the  penury  heaped  on  me  by  thee.” 

Ill,  i,  286-295. 

In  this  search  for  the  manifestation  of  the  father  complex 
of  Shelley  I  have  commenced  with  the  Cenci ,  because  Giacomo 
in  this  drama  gives  us  a  key  to  the  whole  situation.  Giacomo  is 
the  first  born  son  of  a  nobleman,  so  was  Shelley.  Giacomo  had 
wide  wants  and  narrow  powers,  so  had  Shelley.  Giacomo  was  at 
war  with  his  father,  so  was  Shelley.  Giacomo  was  cut  off  by 
his  father  without  a  proper  allowance,  so  was  Shelley.  It  is 
clearly  evident  that  the  relationship  between  Giacomo  and  the  old 
Count  Cenci  parallels  that  between  Shelley  and  his  father.  Gia¬ 
como  therefore  is  Shelley  and  if  that  is  true  the  old  Count  Cenci 
is  Shelley’s  father. 

If,  now,  we  look  at  the  characteristics  of  the  Count  we  can 
find  them  again  in  the  old  king  who  figures  in  The  Revolt  of 
Islam  though  there  is  no  Giacomo  here  to  help  in  the  identifica¬ 
tion. 

The  old  king  in  The  Revolt  of  Islam  just  like  Count  Cenci 
was  utterly  insensible  to  the  sufferings  of  others.  He  was  also 


26 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


insensitive  to  the  debt  of  gratitude  due  to  the  kindness  showered 
on  him  by  those  who,  after  a  triumphant  revolt  against  his  tyr¬ 
anny,  spared  his  life.  For  when  his  counter  revolt  brought  him 
again  in  power 

The  Tyrant  passed,  surrounded  by  the  steel 
Of  hired  assassins,  through  the  public  way, 

Choked  with  his  country’s  dead, — his  footsteps  reel 
On  the  fresh  blood — he  smiles.  “Ay,  now  I  feel 
I  am  a  King  in  truth!”  he  said;  and  took 

His  royal  seat,  and  bade  the  torturing  wheel 
Be  brought,  and  fire,  and  pincers,  and  the  hook, 

And  scorpions,  that  his  soul  on  its  revenge  might  look. 

X,  viii. 

This  heartless  old  man  is  the  same  type  of  personality  as  Count 
Cenci.  He  represents  authority  for  he  is  king  and  in  both  re¬ 
spects  he  is  the  replica  of  Shelley’s  childhood  picture  of  his  father. 
But  this  time  instead  of  wreaking  just  vengeance  on  his  tyranni¬ 
cal,  unfeeling  father, — Shelley  pictures  how  he  would  have  suf¬ 
fered  and  deserved  sympathy  had  he  fallen  into  his  father’s 
hands.  When  we  consider  the  fictions  mentioned  below  of 
imaginary  persecutions  of  Shelley  by  his  father,  and  also  the  evi¬ 
dence  of  his  keen  craving  for  sympathy,  we  shall  have  no  trouble 
in  seeing  that  psychologically  The  Revolt  of  Islam  is  the  same 
dream  as  the  Cenci — but  with  the  tables  turned.  The  turning  of 
the  tables  gains  for  Shelley  his  much  craved  sympathy. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  Shelley  himself  is  the  hero  of 
the  poem,  persecuted  by  the  king,  as  Giacomo  was  persecuted  by 
Count  Cenci. 

It  is  Shelley  who  dramatically  throws  himself  into  the  hands 
of  the  tyrant  and  cries  to  his  minions : 

“With  me  do  what  ye  will.  I  am  your  foe!” 

The  light  of  such  a  joy  as  makes  the  stare 
Of  hungry  snakes  like  living  emeralds  glow 
Shone  in  a  hundred  eyes. — “Where,  where 
Is  Laon?  Haste!  fly!  drag  him  swiftly  here! 

We  grant  thy  boon?” — “I  put  no  trust  in  ye; 

Swear  by  the  Power  ye  dread” — “We  swear,  we  swear!” 
The  stranger  threw  his  vest  back  suddenly, 

And  smiled  in  gentle  pride,  and  said  “Lo!  I  am  he!” 

XI,  xxv. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


27 


Shelley’s  father  complex  and  his  craving  of  unjust  persecu¬ 
tion,  for  the  sake  of  sympathy,  were  the  dominant  psychological 
features  in  the  weaving  of  his  dream  of  the  Revolt  of  Islam. 

By  way  of  transition  to  the  next  poem  in  which  his  father 
complex  makes  itself  manifest,  let  us  note  the  similarity  between 
the  punishment  of  Laon  in  the  earlier  part  of  The  Revolt  of  Islam 
and  the  condition  in  which  the  hero  is  found  at  the  opening  of 
Prometheus  Unbound. 

Laon  was  arrested  without  reason  by  the  tyrant  King  and 
bound  to  a  rock  overhanging  the  town  below. 

They  bore  me  to  a  cavern  in  the  hill 

Beneath  that  column,  and  unbound  me  there. 

And  one  did  strip  me  stark;  and  one  did  fill 
A  vessel  from  the  putrid  pool;  one  bare 
A  lighted  torch;  and  four  with  friendless  care 
Guided  my  steps  the  cavern-paths  along. 

Then  up  a  steep  and  dark  and  narrow  stair 
We  wound,  until  the  fiery  torches’  tongue 

Amid  the  gushing  day  beamless  and  pallid  hung. 

They  raised  me  to  the  platform  of  the  pile, 

That  column’s  dizzy  height: — the  grate  of  brass, 
Through  which  they  thrust  me,  open  stood  the  while, 

As  to  its  ponderous  and  suspended  mass, 

With  chains  which  eat  into  my  flesh,  alas ! 

With  brazen  links  my  naked  limbs  they  bound : 

The  grate,  as  they  departed  to  repass, 

With  horrid  clangour  fell,  and  the  far  sound 

Of  their  retiring  steps  in  the  dense  gloom  was  drowned. 

Ill,  xiii-xiv. 

Th^  analogy  with  Prometheus  is  evident.  Both  Laon  and 
Prometheus  are  personifications  of  Shelley. 

Later  on  Laon  was  liberated  by  an  old  hermit.  It  is  interest¬ 
ing  to  note  that  Dowden  recognizes  in  this  old  man  the  physician, 
Dr.  Lind,  the  friend  of  Shelley’s  boyhood,  who  occupied  a  place 
in  his  affections  that  should  have  been  that  of  his  father.  Dow¬ 
den  writes  that  Dr.  Lind  “lives  in  Shelley’s  verse  as  the  old 
hermit  who  liberates  Laon  from  the  dizzy  platform  on  which  he 
stood  enchained  until  his  brain  reeled  and  maddened,  who  bears 


28 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


the  youth  to  that  curious  chamber  strewn  with  rarest  sea-shells 
and  tapestried  with  moss,  where  the  sage  had  gathered  many  a 
wise  tome,  and  tends  him  there  until  Laon’s  withered  brain  is 
soothed  and  healed.”1 

In  the  Prometheus  Unbound  we  have  another  exemplification 
of  the  analogy  between  the  dream  and  the  myth  woven  by  the 
poetical  imagination  of  the  author.  Among  the  characteristic 
attributes  of  the  dream  are  its  pictures  of  a  wish  fulfilment — the 
attainment  of  something  yearned  for  by  the  dreamer  and  the  re¬ 
lentless  revenge  wreaked  on  some  one  who  has  done  him  harm. 
In  perfect  accord  with  this  law  of  the  dream,  Shelley  pictures 
his  final  triumph  over  his  own  father  who  drove  him  from  home 
and  was  unrelenting  and  unmerciful  to  the  end. 

To  understand  this  poem  fully  we  must  also  appreciate  another 
law  of  the  mind.  Once  an  individual  has  crossed  another  in  any¬ 
thing  of  serious  moment  there  is  a  tendency  to  hate  not  only  him 
but  everything  with  which  he  is  connected.  A  pathological  as¬ 
sociation  is  welded  between  the  personality  of  him  who  injures 
and  everything  for  which  he  stands.  Shelley's  father  stood  for 
authority;  and  so  Shelley  revolted  against  all  that  law  holds 
sacred.  This  revolt  was  accentuated  by  the  harsh  domination  of 
his  teachers  and  the  bullying  of  older  boys  in  his  school  days. 
Shelley,  therefore,  became  a  thorough  anarchist  and  rose  up 
against  the  sanctioned  customs  of  society,  God,  religion,  law,  and 
order;  and  dreamed  of  the  triumph  of  the  aboriginal  and  un¬ 
trammeled  man.  This  dream  is  woven  for  us  in  his  Prometheus 
Unbound. 

It  is  the  same  dream  as  The  Cenci,  but  clothed  in  other  sym¬ 
bols.  In  The  Cenci  his  father  is  portrayed  as  the  base  and  un¬ 
natural  creature  who  rejoiced  over  the  death  of  his  sons  and  the 
rape  of  his  daughter.  And  so  Shelley  wreaks  his  vengeance  upon 
him  by  portraying  him  in  such  horrid  form  and  then  slaying 
him  by  assassins  hired  by  his  daughter.  Those  familiar  with  the 
psychoanalytic  interpretation  of  the  dream  will  not  be  surprised 
at  such  an  interpretation.  The  Cenci  shows  that  unconsciously 

1  Edward  Dowden,  The  Life  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley,  1866,  I,  p.  33. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


29 


Shelley  would  have  liked  to  kill  his  father.  This  does  not  mean 
that  such  a  thought  ever  actually  entered  his  conscious  mind. 

In  the  same  way  he  revenges  himself  on  his  father  in  Pro¬ 
metheus  Unbound .  But  the  father  idea  is  here  extended  by  the 
law  of  pathological  association.  Shelley’s  father  here  stands  as 
the  representative  of  law,  order,  might,  power,  and  creative 
majesty  in  the  person  of  Jupiter  who  is  a  travesty  of  God  Al¬ 
mighty.  Just  as  Francesco  Cenci  is  an  overdrawn  figure  of  an 
unnatural  father,  so  Jupiter  is  pictured  as  a  harsh  and  unbending 
tyrant,  cruel,  without  sympathy,  taking  a  fiendish  delight  in  the 
torture  of  one  who  would  not  bow  to  his  authority,  as  Shelley 
would  not  submit  to  parental  discipline. 

And  so  Prometheus  in  the  opening  words  of  the  poem  ad¬ 
dresses  the  Almighty: 

Monarch  of  Gods  and  Daemons,  and  all  Spirits — 

But  One — who  throng  those  bright  and  rolling  worlds 
Which  Thou  and  I  alone  of  living  things 
Behold  with  sleepless  eyes!  regard  this  Earth 
Made  multitudinous  with  thy  slaves,  whom  thou 
Requitest  for  knee-worship,  prayer,  and  praise, 

And  toil,  and  hecatombs  of  broken  hearts, 

With  fear  and  self-contempt  and  barren  hope; 

Whilst  me,  who  am  thy  foe,  eyeless  in  hate, 

Hast  thou  made  reign  and  triumph,  to  thy  scorn, 

O’er  mine  own  misery  and  thy  vain  revenge. 

Three  thousand  years  of  sleep-unsheltered  hours, 

And  moments  aye  divided  by  keen  pangs 
Till  they  seemed  years,  torture  and  solitude, 

Scorn  and  despair — these  are  mine  empire : — 

More  glorious  far  than  that  which  thou  surveyest 
From  thine  unenvied  throne,  O  Mighty  God! 

Such  words  as  these  refer  to  no  mythological  personage.  They 
are  Shelley’s  reaction  to  the  theistic  concept,  determined,  not  by 
reason,  but  by  the  emotional  resonance  of  his  father-complex. 

Prometheus  himself  is  a  fusion  of  several  concepts.  Shelley 
himself  recognized  in  him  a  satanic  element. 

“The  only  imaginary  being  resembling  in  any  degree  Prome¬ 
theus,  is  Satan;  and  Prometheus  is,  in  my  judgment,  a  more 


30 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


poetical  character  than  Satan  because,  in  addition  to  courage,  and 
majesty,  and  firm  and  patient  opposition  to  omnipotent  force, 
he  is  susceptible  to  being  described  as  exempt  from  the  taints  of 
ambition,  envy,  revenge,  and  a  desire  for  personal  aggrandize¬ 
ment.”2 

Prometheus  is  Satan  in  so  far  as  he  is  rebellious  against  God. 
But  Shelley  would  idealize  his  Satanic  majesty  and  remove  all 
hate  and  self-seeking.  And  so  he  makes  him  the  soul  of  man 
who  alone  in  the  world  is  capable  of  resisting  in  his  moral  life 
the  will  of  the  Almighty. 

In  the  third  act  Jupiter  complains: 

All  else  had  been  subdued  to  me;  alone 
The  soul  of  Man,  like  unextinguished  fire, 

Yet  burns  towards  heaven  with  fierce  reproach,  and  doubt. 

And  so  Prometheus  is  humanity  idealized  of  whom  Shelley 
dreams  as  resisting  God  till  God  himself  is  finally  overcome  by 
Demogorgon. 

Who  is  Demogorgon? 

Panthea  thus  describes  him  when  the  veil  fell  from  before  him 
as  he  sat  on  his  ebon  throne : 

I  see  a  mighty  Darkness 
Filling  the  seat  of  power;  and  rays  of  gloom 
Dart  round,  as  light  from  the  meridian  sun, 
Ungazed-upon  and  shapeless.  Neither  limb, 

Nor  form,  nor  outline  yet  we  feel  it  is 
A  living  Spirit. 

Act  II,  Scene  iv. 

He  is  one  who  when  asked  who  “fills  the  faint  eyes  with  fall¬ 
ing  tears”  and  “leaves  the  peopled  earth  a  solitude”  answers  with 
satanic  sarcasm,  Merciful  God. 

In  Murray’s  English  Dictionary  we  get  the  following  account 
of  the  word  Demogorgon :  “Name  of  a  mysterious  and  terrible 
infernal  deity.  First  mentioned  (so  far  as  known)  by  the  Schol- 

2  Shelley’s  Preface  to  Prometheus.  H.  B.  Forman’s  edition  of  the  Works 
of  Shelley,  II,  p.  140. 

3  P.  216,  4-6. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


3i 


iast  (Lactantius  or  Lutatius  Placidus?  c.  450)  on  Statius  Theb . 
IV.  516,  as  the  name  of  the  great  nether  deity  invoked  in  magic 
rites.  Mentioned  also  by  a  scholiast  on  Lucan  Pharsalia,  VI, 
742.  Described  in  the  Repertorium  of  Conrad  de  Mure  (1273) 
as  the  primordial  God  of  ancient  mythology;  so  in  the  Genea- 
logia  Deormn  of  Boccaccio.  The  latter  appears  to  be  the  source 
of  the  word  in  modern  literature  (Ariosto,  Spenser,  Milton,  Shel¬ 
ley,  etc.)” 

Shelley’s  interest  in  magic  while  at  Eton  has  already  been  de¬ 
scribed.  It  was  the  reaction  of  his  mind  against  authority  and 
the  established  religion,  with  which  authority  was  associated. 
And  so  in  the  dream  of  Prometheus  he  conjures  spirits  from  the 
dead  and  finally  makes  the  demon  of  magic  triumph  over  Divin¬ 
ity.  No  revolution  could  be  more  complete  than  the  revolution 
of  the  universe  in  which  Satan  triumphs  over  God.  It  is  this 
dream  that  Shelley  unfolds  in  Prometheus. 

There  is  another  element  in  the  character  of  Prometheus.  This 
element  is  Shelley  himself.  Dream  personalities  are  often  com¬ 
posite  photographs.  The  dream  is  a  kind  of  delusion  of  grandeur. 
Shelley  is  the  ideal  man  who  triumphs  by  Satanic  might  over 
the  Almighty  power  which  like  all  power  in  Shelley’s  eyes  was 
inherently  wicked.  And  so  Prometheus  and  Demogorgon  are 
purified  of  the  elements  that  are  most  objectionable  in  Shelley’s 
conscious  philosophy — that  is  hate  and  cruelty.  This  probably 
means  that  Shelley  finally  conquered  or  outgrew  his  hate  for  his 
father  and  forgave  him  the  wrongs  he  did  him. 

Prometheus  is  the  liberator  of  mankind  from  the  thraldom  of 
theistic  concepts  and  therefore  in  this  dream  the  final  result  is 
the  triumph  of  Shelley’s  ideals. 

And  so  “thrones  were  kingless  and  men  walked  one  with  the 
other  even  as  spirits  do”;  and  women  were  frank,  beautiful  and 
kind, 

gentle  radiant  forms, 

From  custom’s  evil  taint  exempt  and  pure; 

Speaking  the  wisdom  once  they  could  not  think, 

Looking  emotions  once  they  feared  to  feel, 

And  changed  to  all  which  once  they  dared  not  be. 


32 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


“Sceptres,  tiaras,  swords,  and  chains,  and  tomes  of  reasoned 
wrong"  were  but  “the  ghosts  of  a  no  more  remembered  fame.” 

Jupiter,  the  tyrant  of  the  world,  in  whatever  form  he  has  been 
worshiped  by  man,  is  known  no  more,  his  shrine  is  abandoned. 

The  loathsome  mask  has  fallen.  The  man  remains, — 
Sceptreless,  free,  uncircumscribed,  but  man. 

Equal,  unclassed,  tribeless,  and  nationless, 

Exempt  from  awe,  worship,  degree,  the  king 
Over  himself;  just,  gentle,  wise:  but  man. 

Passionless?  no: — yet  free  from  guilt  or  pain. 


CHAPTER  V 


The  Driving  Forces  in  Shelley’s  Life 

The  driving  forces  in  Shelley’s  life  have  been  indicated  in  part 
in  the  study  of  his  plan  of  life.  Thus  we  have  shown  on  the 
basis  of  his  own  self-analysis  in  Alastor  that  the  dominant  drive 
was  the  craving  for  an  ideal  woman  of  sensual  charm  and  the 
intellectual  ability  to  understand  his  poetical  and  philosophical 
concepts.  This  ideal  woman  was  never  found.  One  of  the  ele¬ 
ments  of  tragedy  in  his  life  was  his  tendency  to  idealize  a  woman 
who  attracted  him.  Thus  he  idealized  his  first  wife,  Harriet, 
thinking  that  she  was  capable  at  least  of  being  elevated  to  his 
poetic  sphere.  When  disillusioned  and  disappointed,  he  met 
Mary  Godwin,  she  was  promptly  idealized;  and  he  forsook  Har¬ 
riet  and  went  off  to  the  continent  with  Mary.  Mary  had  poetic 
appreciation  and  some  poetic  ability,  but  even  with  her  he  was 
not  fully  satisfied. 

There  are  a  number  of  things  in  his  life  and  writings  which  in¬ 
dicate  that  had  Shelley  lived,  Mary  might  have  gone  the  way 
of  Harriet. 

Epipsychidion,  written  after  his  marriage  with  Mary,  is  a  love 
poem  to  an  Italian  girl.  In  that  he  expresses  his  principles  on 
the  married  life  i1 

I  never  was  attached  to  that  great  sect 
Whose  doctrine  is  that  each  one  should  select 
Out  of  the  crowd  a  mistress  or  a  friend, 

And  all  the  rest,  though  fair  and  wise,  commend 
To  cold  oblivion;  though  it  is  in  the  code 

1  The  lines  here  quoted  occur  also  in  an  earlier  draft  of  the  poem  which 
according  to  Mrs.  Shelley  Was  written  before  he  met  Emilia — though  the 
name  Emily  occurs  towards  the  end  of  the  preliminary  fragment.  The  frag¬ 
ment  does  not  contain  the  invitation  mentioned  below  to  fly  with  him  to  his 
Eden  in  the  purple  West  and  lacks  the  living  intensity  of  the  final  production. 
Cf.  Note  on  lines  connected  with  Epipsychidion.  Cambridge.  Edition  of 
Shelley.  Boston,  1901.  P.  436. 


33 


34 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


Of  modern  morals,  and  the  beaten  road 
Which  those  poor  slaves  with  weary  footsteps  tread 
Who  travel  to  their  home  among  the  dead 
By  the  broad  highway  of  the  world,  and  so 
With  one  chained  friend,  perhaps  a  jealous  foe, 

.  The  dreariest  and  the  longest  journey  go.2 

That  a  real  conflict  was  actually  brewing  at  this  time  is  made 
likely 

a)  by  the  fact  that  Shelley  in  this  poem  invites  the  Italian 
girl  to  whom  it  was  dedicated  to  fly  with  him  to  his  far 
Eden  of  the  purple  West.  That  there  was  some  sting  in 
the  invitation  is  evinced  by  the  fact  that  Mary  Shelley  in 
editing  his  poems  appended  explanatory  notes  to  all  the 
longer  poems  with  the  solitary  exception  of  Epipsychidion. 

b)  A  poem  to  Edward  Williams  written  in  1821  indicates  a 
feeling  of  discontent  which  seems  to  relate  to  his  mar¬ 
ried  life  with  Mary.  This  is  the  same  year  in  which 
Shelley  was  idealizing  Emilia  Viviani  to  whom  he  dedi¬ 
cated  his  Epipsychidion.  He  tells  how  the  flowers  have 
told  him  that  '‘She  loves  me  not'5  and  complains  sadly 
that  there  was  truth  to  the  sad  oracle  and  hopes  that 

there  is  a  place  of  peace 

Where  my  weak  heart  and  all  its  throbs  will  cease. 

c)  In  Ginevra  he  speaks  of  bridesmaids  “envying  the  unen¬ 
viable”  and  of  marriage  as 

life’s  great  cheat — a  thing 
Bitter  to  taste,  sweet  in  imagining. 3 

The  “eternal  womanly”  first  in  one  form  and  then  in  another 
was  the  main  positive  driving  force  in  Shelley’s  life.  No  woman 
in  particular  but  his  dream  of  an  ideal  woman  was  the  intellectual 
source  of  the  drive. 

All  his  life  long  “two  eyes,  two  starry  eyes,  hung  in  the  gloom 
of  thought,”  “seemed  with  their  serene  and  azure  smiles  to 

2  Lines  147-159. 

3  Cf.  Hereon  Rossetti’s  note.  Poetical  Works  of  Shelley,  I,  cxiv. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


35 


beckon  him,”  and  ‘‘obedient  to  the  light  that  shone  within  his 
soul,  he  went,  pursuing.”  But  no  earthly  eyes  when  really 
gazed  upon  ever  satisfied  his  poetic  soul.  All  that  was  human 
crumbled  into  dust,  but  the  drive  remained  and  he  sought,  but 
sought  in  vain.  This  drive  was  the  source  of  endless  discontent 
and  forced  him  to  paint  again  and  again  in  his  poems  the  ideal 
woman  whom  he  had  never  met. 

The  negative  driving  force  of  his  life  also  makes  itself  mani¬ 
fest.  This  negative  driving  force  is  the  protest  against  authority. 
We  have  already  seen  how  this  was  manifested  in  his  poetical 
works.  It  showed  itself  also  in  his  political  activities.  He  paid 
a  visit  to  Ireland  and  took  up  the  cause  of  Catholic  emancipation 
because  Ireland,  downtrodden  by  existing  authority,  appealed  to 
the  mechanisms  of  his  character.  Some  of  his  prose  works  indi¬ 
cate  the  same  complex  of  revolt  against  the  established  order: 
A  Vindication  of  Natural  Diet ,  a  little  book  in  which  he  urges 
a  reform  of  diet  to  strike  at  the  root  of  the  abuses  of  legislation : 
A  Refutation  of  Deism ;  A  Proposal  for  Putting  Reform  to  the 
Vote;  On  a  Future  State,  a  fragment  in  which  he  argues  against 
immortality. 

Closely  akin  to  the  craving  for  love  is  the  yearning  for  sym¬ 
pathy.  This  was  developed  in  Shelley  to  a  pathological  degree. 

The  craving  has  various  manifestations.  It  is  in  fact  most  re¬ 
markable  to  see  to  what  extent  men,  as  well  as  women,  will  go 
to  obtain  the  sympathy  of  their  fellow  beings.  How  many  a 
little  pain  and  ache  is  exaggerated  or  even  fabricated  that  one 
may  see  the  gaze  of  a  pair  of  loving  anxious  eyes  and  feel  the 
gentle  stroking  of  a  tender  hand.  Were  Shelley’s  illnesses  af¬ 
fected  by  the  craving  for  sympathy? 

In  a  letter  to  Miss  Clairmont4  Shelley  speaks  of  a  nervous 
irritability  caused  by  his  pains — which  “if  not  incessantly  com¬ 
bated  by  himself  and  soothed  by  others,  would  leave  me  nothing 
but  torment  in  life.” 

The  distinguished  physician,  Vacca,  apparently  found  no  or¬ 
ganic  disease  in  Shelley.  It  is  quite  likely,  therefore,  that  much 

4  Quoted  in  Dowden’s  Life,  Vol.  II,  p.  356. 


36 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


of  Shelley’s  illness  was  a  functional  overflow  due  to  the  craving 
to  be  soothed. 

Another  form  in  which  the  craving  for  sympathy  manifests 
itself  is  to  let  others  see  how  badly  you  are  treated.  In  case, 
however,  one  is  not  sufficiently  wronged,  or  is  only  justly  pun¬ 
ished,  the  mere  publication  of  the  facts  will  not  gain  for  him  the 
much  craved  sympathy.  Under  such  circumstances  the  account 
that  the  sufferer  gives  of  his  misfortunes  is  often  a  gross  mis¬ 
interpretation  of  the  true  facts  in  the  case.  It  is  likely,  that  the 
misinterpretation  is  not  a  conscious  lie,  but  merely  a  statement 
colored  by  bias.  Sometimes  children,  and  even  adults,  do  some¬ 
thing  to  provoke  retaliation  that  others  may  see  how  badly  they 
are  treated.  One  child  who  was  brought  to  the  Johns  Hopkins 
Dispensary  actually  did  himself  what,  if  others  had  done  to  him, 
would  certainly  have  merited  the  sympathy  of  any  passer  by. 
When  provoked  by  the  children  with  whom  he  was  playing  he 
would  run  into  the  street  and  throw  himself  down  in  front  of 
a  moving  vehicle  and  cry  out:  “See  what  you  have  gone  and 
made  me  do.”  This,  however,  is  an  extreme  case.  Most  cravers 
for  sympathy  instead  of  any  such  childish  attempt  to  get  what 
they  desire,  content  themselves  with  imaginary  incidents  in  which 
they  are  unjustly  persecuted,  if  the  real  events  of  life  do  not 
bring  upon  them  anything  that  may  be  distorted  into  an  unjust 
persecution.  And  such  was  the  case  with  Shelley. 

Rosalind  and  Helen  is  a  dream  in  which  the  dominant  motif 
is  this  childish  craving  for  sympathy. 

Rosalind’s  husband  left  a  will  in  which  he  untruly  accused  her 
of  being  an  adulteress  and  secretly  holding  that  the  Christian 
creed  was  false;  and,  therefore,  if  she  did  not  depart  from  her 
home  within  three  days,  and  if  afterwards  she  ever  sought  to 
see  her  children  again  they  would  be  disinherited  and  all  their 
patrimony  turned  over  to  their  next  of  kin  “a  sallow  lawyer, 
cruel  and  cold.” 

This  is  merely  an  overdrawn  picture  of  an  incident  in  his  own 
life.  Shelley  deserted  his  wife  and  children.  After  his  wife’s 
suicide  they  remained  in  the  custody  of  her  father,  John  West¬ 
brook.  Mr.  Westbrook  attempted  to  gain  possession  of  them  by 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


37 


filing  a  suit  in  the  name  of  the  children  asking  the  Court  of 
Chancery  to  appoint  a  guardian.  The  bill  of  complaint  main¬ 
tained  that  the  father  of  the  children  was  not  a  proper  person  to 
bring  them  up,  because  he  deserted  his  wife  to  cohabit  unlaw¬ 
fully  with  another  woman,  derided  the  Christian  religion,  and 
denied  the  existence  of  God.  As  the  case  proceeded,  the  ques¬ 
tion  narrowed  down  to  Shelley’s  opinions  on  marriage  and  the 
family  unit.  The  judge,  Lord  Eldon,  finally  decided  that  Shelley 
not  only  maintained  that  there  was  no  such  thing  as  marriage, 
but  was  also  immoral  in  his  conduct,  and  that,  therefore,  in  view 
of  the  principles  he  held,  he  was  no  proper  guardian  for  his 
children.5 

When  the  bald  facts  are  presented  they  do  not  necessarily 
secure  sympathy  for  Shelley.  But  Rosalind  is  driven  from  her 
home  and  children  by  a  false  accusation  of  adultery.  Shelley  was 
truly  accused  of  adultery.  Rosalind  was  suspected  merely  of 
secretly  holding  that  Christianity  was  false.  Shelley’s  theologi¬ 
cal  opinions  dropped  out  of  the  discussion,  and  the  question  nar¬ 
rowed  down  to  one  of  fact  whether  or  not  he  was  actually  im¬ 
moral.  Anyone  would  sympathize  with  Rosalind,  many  would 
be  incensed  at  the  conduct  of  Shelley.  So  Shelley  dreamed  of 
Rosalind  and  no  doubt  thought  that  the  same  sympathy  was  due 
him  as  should  be  given  to  Rosalind  and  so  compensated  himself 
for  the  storm  of  criticism  that  his  conduct  brought  down  upon 
him. 

The  second  part  of  the  poem  merely  continues  the  same  motif. 
Shelley  is  personified  in  Helen’s  husband,  Lionel,  whom  the 
“ministers  of  misrule”  seized  upon 

and  bore 

His  chained  limbs  to  a  dreary  tower 
In  the  midst  of  a  city  vast  and  wide : — 

For  he,  they  said,  from  his  mind  had  bent 
Against  their  gods  keen  blasphemy. 

And  so  Lionel  was  imprisoned  for  his  religious  convictions. 

5  Cf.  The  Life  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  by  Edw.  Dowden.  Vol.  II,  ch.  iii. 


38 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


Soon,  but  too  late,  in  penitence 
Or  fear,  his  foes  released  him  thence. 

I  saw  his  thin  and  languid  form, 

As,  leaning  on  the  gaoler’s  arm — 

Whose  hardened  eyes  grew  moist  the  while 
To  meet  his  mute  and  faded  smile. 

Too  late  the  deliverance  came,  for  Lionel,  owing  to  a  disease 
contracted  in  prison,  finally  wasted  away  and  died.  Poor  Lionel ! 
Poor  Shelley!  No  one  ever  imprisoned  him  but  still  it  was 
sweet  to  dream  in  childish  fashion  of  how  fast  tears  would  gush 
and  fall  from  many  who  had  not  wept  before,  if  they  could  but 
see  how  Shelley  suffered  as  Lionel. 

This  craving  for  sympathy  not  only  appeared  in  his  poetry, 
but  was  so  pathological  that  it  manifested  itself  in  delusions  of 
persecution.  Rossetti  relates  the  following  incident: 

“At  the  beginning  of  May,  1816,  Shelley  and  Mary,  with  her 
infant  son  William,  born  on  the  24th  of  January,  and  Miss 
Clairmont,  again  went  abroad,  reaching  Paris  on  the  8th  of  the 
month.  The  practical  reason  for  the  trip  was  probably  the  ob¬ 
vious  one — that  they  felt  inclined  for  it :  but  Shelley  somehow 
conceived  that  there  was  a  more  abstruse  reason — viz.,  that  his 
father  and  uncle  .  .  .  were  laying  a  trap  for  him  with  the  view 
of  locking  him  up,  and  that  Mr.  Williams,  the  agent  of  Mr. 
Madocks  of  Tanyrallt,  had  come  down  to  Bishopgate,  and  given 
him  warning  of  this  plot,  which  the  poet  believed  to  be  only  one 
out  of  many  that  his  father  had  schemed  for  the  same  purpose. 
That  Shelley  made  such  an  allegation  is  certain  from  the  testi¬ 
mony  of  Mr.  Peacock;  and  that  the  allegation  was  untrue  is  con¬ 
vincingly  represented  on  the  same  testimony.’'6 

Rossetti  relates  another  incident  which  shows  that  Shelley  so 
strongly  craved  the  sympathy  due  the  martyr  that  he  seems  to 
have  fabricated  another  delusion. 

“Somewhere  about  this  time,  Shelley  (we  are  told)  having 
called  at  the  Pisa  Post-Office,  an  English  officer  in  the  Portuguese 
service  apostrophized  him  with  the  exclamation  :  ‘What !  are  you 
that  damned  atheist  Shelly?’  and,  without  more  ado,  struck  him 

e  Memoir  in  the  Poetical  Works  of  Shelley,  I,  p.  lxxxii. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


39 


to  the  ground  with  a  stick,  stunning  him  at  the  moment.  He  was 
a  tall  and  powerful  man.  Shelley  looked  up  his  acquaintance, 
Mr.  Tighe,  .  .  .  ‘who  lost  no  time  in  taking  measures  to  obtain 
satisfaction.’  The  proficient  in  theism  and  blackguardism  was 
traced  to  the  hotel  of  the  Tre  Donzelle,  and  thence  to  Genoa, 
whither  Mr.  Tighe  (and  it  is  said  Shelley  also)  followed  him: 
but  he  was  never  run  down.  This  is  another  of  the  singular 
stories  told  by  Shelley,  and  discredited  by  most  of  his  biogra¬ 
phers:  the  inclination  of  my  own  mind  would  be  to  accept  it, 
were  it  not  that  I  find  Mr.  Trelawny  a  decided  disbeliever.”7 

It  is  much  more  easy  to  understand  such  an  incident  as  a  de¬ 
lusion  fabricated  by  his  craving  for  sympathy  for  his  being  perse¬ 
cuted — the  same  craving  that  manifests  itself  in  Rosalind  and 
Helen — than  it  is  to  comprehend  the  psychology  of  the  sudden 
attack  launched  by  an  unknown  officer  at  the  mere  hearing  of 
the  name  of  Shelley.  It  really  seems  that  there  was  an  element 
of  the  grandiose  in  this  remarkable  delusion. 


7  Op.  cit.,  p.  cxxvi. 


CHAPTER  VI 


Hours  of  Conflict 

The  characteristic  modes  of  adjustment  of  a  human  being  are 
best  seen  in  his  hours  of  trial.  It  is  then  that  his  character  re¬ 
veals  itself  by  spontaneous  reactions  that  it  is  impossible  to  sup¬ 
press. 

The  supreme  trial  of  Shelley’s  days  was  the  disintegration  of 
his  married  life  with  Harriet.  It  was,  however,  a  trial  that  did 
not  extend  over  a  very  long  period.  This,  in  itself,  is  a  char¬ 
acteristic  trait.  Some  individuals  are  so  restless  under  unhappi¬ 
ness  that  by  defense  reactions  and  compensations  they  soon 
escape  from  an  intolerable  situation  and  do  not  sink  under  it, 
brooding  over  their  calamity  in  a  deep  depression.  Shelley  was 
one  of  these.  Like  all  human  beings  he  felt  sorrow,  but  it  was 
a  goad  that  stimulated  him  to  avoid  it.  It  brought  his  defense 
reactions  into  activity;  and,  all  unconsciously,  his  heart  sent  out 
tentacles  that  grasped  at  whatever  compensation  might  be  in 
reach.  Shelley  is  thus  separated  from  the  depressive  reaction 
type — even  though  in  Alastor  he  pictures  himself  as  pining  away 
for  grief.  In  his  preface  to  this  poem  he  thus  speaks  of  his 
ideal  poet. 

“He  images  to  himself  the  Being  whom  he  loves.  .  .  ,  He 
seeks  in  vain  for  a  prototype  of  his  conception.  Blasted  by  dis¬ 
appointment,  he  descends  to  an  untimely  grave/’  This  is  merely 
an  appeal  for  sympathy.  He  wants  to  picture  himself  as  wasting 
away  for  grief,  because  in  such  a  state  sympathy  will  be  lavished 
upon  him. 

During  this  crisis  of  his  life  Shelley  gives  no  evidence  of  the 
wasting  depression  he  idealized  for  himself.  Though  he  writes 
to  Hogg:  “My  friend  you  are  happier  than  I.  You  have  the 
pleasures  as  well  as  the  pains  of  sensibility.  I  have  sunk  into  a 
premature  old  age  of  exhaustion.”1  These  words  are  to  be  taken 

1  Quoted  from  Edw.  Dowden’s  Life.  London,  1886.  Vol.  I,  pp.  408-9. 

40 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


41 


as  an  appeal  for  the  sympathy  of  his  friend  rather  than  the  ex¬ 
pression  of  a  fact.  For,  a  little  later,  he  tells  us  how  he  is  active 
with  compensations  involving  more  labor  than  any  depressed 
person  wasting  away  with  his  sorrow  could  ever  attempt.  He  is 
studying  Italian  again,  reading  Beccaria  though  it  involved  forced 
attention.  A  few  months  later  he  ventures  to  attempt  to  raise 
three  thousand  pounds  for  Mr.  Godwin.2  Such  activities  as 
these  were  incompatible  with  anything  approaching  a  depression. 

But  that  he  really  suffered  cannot  be  doubted.  The  dominant 
driving  force  of  his  nature  was,  as  we  have  pointed  out,  the 
yearning  for  an  ideal  woman  who  would  combine  sensual  beauty 
with  intellectual  powers  capable  of  understanding  him  and  his 
poetic  aspirations.  Gradually  he  came  to  realize  that  Harriet 
did  not  understand  him  and,  what  was  more,  she  never  could. 

The  dominant  driving  force  of  his  nature  had  not  led  to  his 
marriage  with  her.  She  had  never  appeared  before  him  as  his 
ideal  woman  uniting  sensual  charms  with  intellectual  abilities. 
He  had  been  driven  to  his  marriage  by  his  father  complex.  She 
seemed  to  him  an  unfortunate  creature  persecuted  by  her  father 
as  he  was  by  his ;  and  so  he  rose  up  as  her  defender  and  delivered 
her  from  tyranny  and  oppression  by  marrying  her.  It  was  one 
of  his  many  acts  of  protest  against  the  domination  of  authority 
whether  justifiable  or  not.  And  when  it  was  all  over  he  tried  to 
elevate  her  to  his  poetic  level  and  for  a  while  she  responded.  But 
after  the  birth  of  her  first  child  she  found  in  her  babe  another 
outlet  for  her  affections  and  took  less  kindly  to  her  husband’s 
ideals.  She  did  not  like  to  read  poetry  and  “trouble  the  golden 
gateway  of  the  stars.”  The  practical  problems  of  life  absorbed 
her  attention.  And  so  she  appeared  indifferent  though  her  let¬ 
ters  to  her  friend,  Mrs.  Nugent,  after  the  separation  indicate 
that  this  was  not  really  the  case.3  Nevertheless  Shelley  felt  that 
she  was  cold  and  thus  complains  in  his  poem  to  Harriet  written 
in  May,  1814. 

2  Dowden,  op.  tit.,  p.  417. 

3  Cf.  The  Letters  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley.  Ed.  by  Roger  Ingpen,  London, 
1914.  Vol.  II,  Appendix  I,  Harriet  Shelley’s  Correspondence. 


42 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


O  trust  for  once  no  erring  guide ! 

Bid  the  remorseless  feeling  flee; 

Tis  malice,  ’tis  revenge,  ’tis  pride, 

Tis  anything  but  thee; 

O  deign  a  nobler  pride  to  prove, 

And  pity  if  thou  canst  not  love. 

In  Alastor  he  pictures  the  poet  wasting  away  for  grief  because 
he  could  not  find  his  lady  love. 

Upon  an  ivied  stone 

Reclined  his  languid  head,  his  limbs  did  rest, 

Diffused  and  motionless,  on  the  smooth  brink 
Of  that  obscurest  chasm; — and  thus  he  lay, 
Surrendering  to  their  final  impulses 
The  hovering  powers  of  life. 

This  is  his  apology  for  his  desertion  of  Harriet.  I  sought  my 
lady  love.  Had  I  not  found  her  I  would  have  died.  I  had  looked 
for  her  in  vain  in  Harriet,  and  was  I  to  waste  and  die?  She  came 
to  me  in  Mary,  one  whose  charms  I  felt,  and  who  could  under¬ 
stand  my  soul.  He  said  to  his  friend  Peacock:  “Everyone 
knows  that  the  partner  of  my  life  should  be  one  who  can  feel 
poetry  and  understand  philosophy.  Harriet  is  a  noble  animal  but 
but  she  can  do  neither.”4 

We  see  here  nothing  but  the  drive  of  the  pleasure-pain  prin¬ 
ciple.  “I  wanted  Mary  and  I  was  unhappy  with  Harriet”  sums 
up  the  whole  situation.  There  is  no  trace  of  a  moral  conflict. 
Nor  at  this  period  of  his  life  was  there  any  basis  for  such  a  con¬ 
flict.  Long  ago  he  had  done  away  with  the  possibility  of  any 
such  trouble  in  his  life  by  his  revolt  against  authority  brought 
on  by  the  harsh  experience  of  his  childhood  days  and  the  unre¬ 
lenting  severity  of  his  father.  That  revolt  had  extended  itself 
to  everything  that  authority  upholds  and  so  had  swept  away  the 
ordinary  moral  ideals  of  the  social  order  in  which  he  lived. 
Without  moral  ideals  there  can  be  no  moral  conflict.  And  so  in 
this  period  of  his  life  as  in  all  others  of  which  we  have  any  trace, 
Shelley’s  conflict  was  not  between  moral  ideals  that  he  was  strug¬ 
gling  to  maintain  and  his  innate  cravings  for  blind  satisfaction; 

4  Note  p.  434-5,  Vol.  I  of  Dowden's  Life. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


43 


but  between  the  drive  to  seek  the  satisfaction  he  desired  and  the 
blocks  that  reality  set  in  the  way  of  its  attainment. 

A  second  time  of  conflict  came  when  he  heard  of  the  suicide 
of  Harriet.  This  brought  on  essentially  the  same  struggle  but  in 
a  new  field.  When  the  problem  of  the  desertion  of  Harriet  was 
acute,  he  felt  that  he  would  have  to  justify  himself  in  the  forum 
of  his  own  conscience  and  also  in  public  opinion.  His  excuse  to 
himself  is  given  in  Alastor:  I  should  have  died  under  the  burden 
had  I  tried  to  keep  up  my  unhappy  life  away  from  the  ideal  wo¬ 
man  whom  I  loved.  His  excuse  to  his  friends  accentuated  the 
shortcomings  of  Harriet — a  noble  animal  she  was  indeed,  but 
she  could  not  rise  to  my  lofty  poetic  and  philosophical  world.  I 
did  my  best  to  elevate  her  but  she  sank  back  to  the  low  levels 
from  which  I  raised  her.  She  simply  could  not  understand 
poetry  and  philosophy.  And  that  after  all  was  a  conditio  sine 
qua  non  in  any  woman  who  was  to  be  my  wife. 

When  the  news  of  Harriet’s  suicide  came  to  him,  it  precipitated 
a  severe  conflict  between  the  reproach  of  conscience  and  his  ideal 
of  a  perfect  gentleman.  The  resolution  of  the  conflict  admitted 
of  no  self-reproach.  It  excused  him  completely  and  so  his  high 
opinion  of  himself  was  maintained.  He  remained  the  noble 
Prince  Athanase  of  his  dreams. 

That  the  conflict  was  very  severe  is  abundantly  proved. 

“All  authorities  agree  in  testifying  to  the  painful  severity  with 
which  the  poet  felt  the  shock,  and  the  permanence  of  the  im¬ 
pression.  Leigh  Hunt  says  that  Shelley  never  forgot  it;  it  tore 
him  to  pieces  for  a  time,  and  he  felt  remorse  at  having  brought 
Harriet  in  the  first  instance  into  an  atmosphere  of  thought  and 
life  for  which  her  strength  of  mind  had  not  qualified  her.”5 

I  have  looked  in  vain  for  any  expression  of  sorrow  by  Shelley 
that  involved  the  recognition  of  the  crime  of  his  desertion.  He 
defends  himself  in  this  crisis  against  the  realization  of  moral 
guilt  and  against  ideas  that  would  cloud  his  present  happy  life 
with  Mary  Godwin.  His  responsibility  is  referred  to  something 
far  in  the  past  which  after  all  was  an  act  of  magnanimity  on  his 
part — a  condescension  which  at  most  was  an  error  of  judgment 


5  Rossetti,  Memoir,  p.  xciii. 


44 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


He  made  a  mistake,  but  that  mistake  came  from  his  liberality. 
He  often  boasts  of  this  liberality  in  his  heroes  who  reflect  his  own 
personal  ideals.  He  defends  himself  against  a  sense  of  guilt  for 
deserting  his  pregnant  wife  and  little  child  and  returning  her  to 
the  harshness  of  a  father  from  whom  he  once  delivered  her.  He 
does  not  want  to  think  that  he  is  responsible  for  the  two  years 
of  misery  that  terminated  in  her  suicide.  He  attributes  all  guilt 
to  her  family  in  a  letter  to  Mary  Godwin. 

“Hookham,  Longdill,  everyone,  does  me  full  justice;  bears 
testimony  to  the  upright  spirit  and  liberality  of  my  conduct  to 
her.  There  is  but  one  voice  in  condemnation  of  the  detestable 
Westbrooks.  If  they  should  dare  to  bring  it  before  chancery,  a 
scene  of  such  fearful  horror  would  be  unfolded  as  would  cover 
them  with  scorn  and  shame.”6 

This  was  the  most  serious  conflict  of  his  life.  It  was  a  conflict 
between  his  self  ideal  and  the  realization  of  a  crime  that  would 
have  dashed  that  glittering  statue  from  its  pedestal  and  revealed 
himself  to  himself  as  he  really  was. 

In  Alastor  he  draws  his  ideal  of  a  poet,  which  was  only  the 
ideal  he  tried  to  impose  upon  himself,  not  by  victory  nor  by  moral 
conquest,  but  by  dreaming  of  what  he  should  be  and  flattering 
himself  that  in  himself  he  realized  his  dream. 

The  fountains  of  divine  philosophy 
Fled  not  his  thirsting  lips :  and  all  of  great 
Or  good  or  lovely  which  the  sacred  past 
In  truth  or  fable  consecrates  he  felt 
And  knew. 

Again  when  in  the  fragment  on  Price  Athanase  he  says 

For  none  than  he  a  purer  heart  could  have, 

Or  that  loved  good  more  for  itself  alone; 

Of  naught  in  heaven  or  earth  was  he  the  slave. 

he  is  depicting  his  ideal  of  himself. 

When,  therefore,  Harriet’s  suicide  made  him  face  the  crime 
of  deserting  his  wife  and  imposing  on  her  two  years  of  a  miser- 

6  Letter  248  from  The  Letters  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley.  Edited  by  Roger 
lngpen,  1914.  Vol.  II,  p.  534. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


45 


able  existence  from  which  she  sought  relief  in  drowning,  his  de¬ 
fense  reactions  cast  a  screen  about  this  stain  upon  his  pure  heart 
and  noble  mind  and  he  says : 

(1)  “Everything  tends  to  prove,  however,  that  beyond  the 
shock  of  so  hideous  a  catastrophe  having  fallen  on  a 
human  being  once  so  nearly  connected  with  me,  there 
would  in  any  case  have  been  little  to  regret.”7 

In  plain  words,  Harriet  after  I  deserted  her  descended  so 
low  that  she  is  not  worth  mourning.  Some  few  months 
later  he  spoke  of  her  as  a  “frantic  idiot.”8 

(2)  Everyone,  furthermore,  bears  testimony  to  my  upright 
spirit  and  my  liberality  of  conduct. 

(3)  The  persons  really  responsible  for  her  suicide  are  the 
members  of  her  own  family  who  treated  her  so  cruelly. 

(4)  I  am  indeed  in  some  measure  to  blame;  not  indeed  for 
a  moral  crime,  but  a  mistake  made  possible  by  my  gen¬ 
erosity  and  nobility  of  mind.  It  was  a  wrong  for  me  to 
have  taken  pity  on  her  and  elevated  her  to  my  superior 
sphere  of  thought  and  life. 

This  conflict  reveals  a  characteristic  trait  and  it  is  with  this 
that  we  are  interested  and  not  the  merits  of  the  case.  There  are 
some  people  who  see  their  faults  in  an  exaggerated  light.  There 
are  others  who  cannot  see  them  at  all.  Shelley  belonged  to  the 
latter  class. 

In  the  over  compensation  of  his  revolt  against  tyranny,  he  got 
rid  of  the  burdensome  load  of  the  ideals  of  conscience  and  kept 
only  their  spangled  coverings.  He  would  be  good  in  dreams  but 
not  in  reality.  The  mechanism  of  his  defense  reactions  made 
this  possible  and  by  shifting  responsibility  and  fabricating  dis¬ 
honest  excuses  he  maintained  in  the  citadel  of  his  mind  his  bar¬ 
ren  and  empty  poetic  dreams. 

Shelley  is  a  type.  He  has  many  replicas  of  whom  we  might 
say  that  the  price  of  self-satisfaction  spares  them  much  pain, 
but  leaves  them  destitute  of  that  true  nobility  of  soul  about  which 

7  Letter  cited  above. 

8  Rossetti,  p.  xciv.  It  is  generally  conceded  that  before  the  separation 
Harriet  gave  her  husband  no  cause  to  complain  of  her  conduct. 


46 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


they  dream,  but  for  which  they  are  unwilling  to  enter  into  the 
moral  conflict  by  which  alone  it  may  be  gained. 

After  all,  by  flying  from  the  moral  conflict,  peace  is  not  ob¬ 
tained.  Crime  will  out.  The  skeleton  rattles  his  bones  in  the 
closet.  The  defense  reactions  give  way  from  time  to  time  and 
the  soul  is  face  to  face  with  itself.  And  so  it  was  with  Shelley. 
One  of  his  most  intimate  friends9  said  that  he  never  forgot  the 
suicide  of  Harriet. 


9  Leigh  Hunt.  Cf.  Rossetti,  p.  xciii. 


CHAPTER  VII 


The  Compensations  of  Shelley 

Thus  we  see  one  of  Shelley’s  characteristic  modes  of  reaction 
in  the  difficulties  of  life.  He  defends  himself  against  them.  He 
was  at  this  time  at  least  no  brooder  over  ills.  He  could  not  bear 
a  painful  situation.  It  stimulated  him  to  action  even  though  this 
was  a  headlong  retreat.  He  could  not  honestly  face  a  situation 
and  pass  true  judgment  on  himself  and  take  the  blame  that  was 
his  due.  His  mind  was  utterly  intolerant  of  self-accusation.  He 
had  to  be  satisfied  with  himself  and  so  his  ideas  and  judgments 
of  himself  were  manipulated  that  he  might  still  remain  in  his 
own  estimation  the  Prince  Athanase  who  had  no  secret  crime  and 
did  not  even  understand  aught  of  ill,  but  was  just  and  innocent 
and  pure. 

That  he  was  so  sensitive  also  to  the  feelings  of  others  came 
from  his  craving  for  sympathy.  His  activity  in  defending  him¬ 
self  is  rooted  in  this  craving  to  have  others  take  his  viewpoint 
and  sympathize  with  him.  This  has  also  something  to  do  with 
his  self-justification.  If  he  himself  cannot  take  his  own  point 
of  view  who  else  can?  If  he  cannot  sympathize  with  his  own 
state  will  he  not  be  blamed  by  others  rather  than  pitied  ?  So  the 
first  step  in  securing  the  good  graces  of  others  was  to  establish 
himself  securely  in  the  citadel  of  his  own  self-estimation.  In 
this  way  Shelley  got  rid  of  anxiety  and  sorrow. 

But  what  did  he  do  for  positive  enjoyment?  What  were  his 
compensations?  At  Sion  House  his  chief  compensation  was 
friendship — to  some  extent  with  Medwin  but  mainly  with  a  boy 
about  his  own  age  to  whom  he  wrote  his  essay  on  Friendship. 
There  seems  to  have  been  an  element  of  homosexuality  in  this 
compensation.  '‘There  was  a  delicacy  and  a  simplicity  in  his 
manners,  inexpressibly  attractive.  .  .  .  The  tone  of  his  voice  was 
so  soft  and  winning,  that  every  word  pierced  into  my  heart;  and 
their  pathos  was  so  deep,  that  in  listening  to  him  the  tears  have 

47 


48 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


involuntarily  gushed  from  my  eyes.  ...  I  remember  we  used  to 
walk  the  whole  play-hours  up  and  down  by  some  moss-covered 
palings,  pouring  out  our  hearts  in  youthful  talk.  We  used  to 
speak  of  the  ladies  with  whom  we  were  in  love,  and  I  remember 
that  our  usual  practice  was  to  confirm  each  other  in  the  ever¬ 
lasting  fidelity,  in  which  we  bound  ourselves  towards  them,  and 
towards  each  other.  I  recollect  thinking  my  friend  exquisitely 
beautiful.  Every  night  when  we  parted  to  go  to  bed,  we  kissed 
each  other  like  children,  as  we  still  were.”1 

His  minor  compensations  at  Sion  House  were  cheap  stories 
and  the  imaginations  that  they  stimulated. 

At  Eton,  friendship  again  constituted  his  chief  compensation. 

“While  at  Eton  he  formed  several  sincere  friendships;  al¬ 
though  disliked  by  the  masters  and  hated  by  his  superiors  in 
age,  he  was  adored  by  his  equals.  He  was  all  passion — passion¬ 
ate  in  his  resistance  to  injury,  passionate  in  his  love.  ,  .  . 

He  became  intimate  also,  at  Eton,  with  a  man  whom  he  never 
mentioned,  except  in  terms  of  the  tenderest  respect.  This  was 
Dr.  Lind,  a  name  well  known  among  the  professors  of  medical 
science.  ‘This  man,’  he  has  often  said,  ‘is  exactly  what  an  old 
man  ought  to  be.  Free,  calm-spirited,  full  of  benevolence,  and 
even  of  youthful  ardour;  his  eye  seemed  to  burn  with  super¬ 
natural  spirit  beneath  his  brow,  shaded  by  his  venerable  white 
locks;  he  was  tall,  vigorous,  and  healthy  in  his  body;  tempered; 
as  it  had  ever  been,  by  his  amiable  mind.  I  owe  to  that  man  far, 
ah!  far  more  than  I  owe  to  my  father;  he  loved  me,  and  I  shall 
never  forget  our  long  talks,  where  he  breathed  the  spirit  of  the 
kindest  tolerance  and  the  purest  wisdom.”2 

The  praise,  love  and  fellowship  in  joy  and  sorrow  that  Shel¬ 
ley  at  this  period  received  from  boys  of  his  own  age  probably 
stimulated  that  innate  yearning  for  sympathy  which  ever  after¬ 
wards  was  an  insatiable  craving  of  his  nature. 

Dr.  Lind  he  idealized  and  on  him  he  fixated  a  boy's  father- 
love  which  had  never  before  found  a  place  of  rest.  These  two 
things  made  his  unhappy  life  at  Eton  a  burden  that  could  be 

1  Life  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  by  Thomas  Jefferson  Hogg  with  an  intro¬ 
duction  by  Prof.  Edw.  Dowden,  London,  1906.  Ch.  1,  pp.  29-30. 

2  Hogg,  op.  cit.,  ch.  2,  pp.  33-34. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


49 


borne.3  His  minor  compensations  consisted  in  spiritualism  and 
chemistry,  both  being  particularly  charming,  because  forbidden; 
and,  therefore,  offering  an  outlet  for  his  spirit  of  revolt.  Curs¬ 
ing  his  father  and  the  king  and  shocking  the  sensibilities  of  the 
devout  afforded  him  also  an  outlet  for  his  lively  temperament. 

As  far  as  one  can  gather  from  the  account  of  Hogg,  Shelley’s 
days  at  Oxford  seemed  to  have  been  happy,  full  of  interest  and 
opportunity.  His  friendship  with  Hogg  constituted  his  greatest 
source  of  happiness  and  he  had  no  great  sorrow  or  disappoint¬ 
ment  for  which  it  acted  as  a  compensation.  He  was  living  out 
his  plan  of  life  as  far  as  possible  under  the  circumstances.  His 
father-complex  still  dominated  his  intellectual  life,  which  con¬ 
tinued  to  be  a  protest  against  the  established  order  though  not  so 
bitter  as  when  at  Eton.  Metaphysics,  chemistry,  in  the  sense  of 
alchemy,  and  poetry  continued  to  amuse  him.  His  metaphysics 
finally  led  him  as  we  have  seen  to  the  publication  of  a  pamphlet 
entitled  The  Necessity  of  Atheism. 

He  and  Hogg  as  we  have  said  were  expelled  from  the  uni¬ 
versity  because  they  declined  to  deny  its  authorship.  His  father 
refused  to  receive  him  home  unless  he  broke  off  completely  with 
Hogg,  and  so  Shelley  was  thrown  on  the  world.  It  was  his  first 
serious  contact  with  the  trials  of  life  and  much  compensation  was 
found  in  the  friendship  with  Hogg.  Then  came  the  loving  pity 
of  his  sisters  who  saved  up  their  pocket  money  and  sent  it  to  him 
by  Harriet  Westbrook. 

And  now  for  the  first  time  he  felt  the  full  charm  of  the  fetish 
of  his  love. 

Whose  eyes  have  I  gazed  fondly  on, 

And  loved  mankind  the  more? 

Harriet!  on  thine: — thou  wert  my  purer  mind; 

Thou  wert  the  inspiration  of  my  song.4 

3  Dr.  Lind  seems  to  have  been  a  doubtful  influence  for  good  in  the  life  of 
Shelley.  When  asked  who  taught  him  to  curse  his  father  he  answered,  “My 
grandfather,  Sir  Bysshe  partly ;  but  principally  my  friend  Dr.  Lind,  at  Eton.” 
Hogg,  op.  cit.,  p.  91.  “He  used  to  go  to  tea  with  the  meek  and  benevolent 
physician  at  Eton;  and  after  tea  they  used  to  curse  King  George  the  Third, 
for  the  doctor  had  really  been,  or  firmly  believed  that  he  had  been,  cruelly 
wronged  by  that  pious  and  domestic,  but  obstinate  and  impracticable  mon¬ 
arch.”  Hogg,  op.  cit.,  p.  91. 

4  To  Harriet  Shelley.  Rossetti  edition,  Vol.  I,  p.  1. 


50 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


He  was  not  destined,  however,  to  find  permanent  satisfaction 
in  human  love.  The  lustre  of  all  human  eyes  faded  and  he  ex¬ 
perienced  this  first  in  the  waning  of  his  love  for  Harriet.  The 
lines  written  in  November  1815  may  perhaps  refer  to  this  death 
of  his  love. 

Thine  eyes  glowed  in  the  glare 
Of  the  moon's  dying  light. 

As  a  fen-fire’s  beam 
On  a  sluggish  stream 
Gleams  dimly,  so  the  moon  shone  then; 

And  it  yellowed  the  strings  of  thy  tangled  hair, 

That  shook  in  the  wind  of  night. 

The  moon  made  thy  lips  pale,  beloved ; 

The  wind  made  thy  bosom  chill; 

The  night  did  shed 
On  thy  dear  head 
Its  frozen  dew,  and  thou  didst  lie 
Where  the  bitter  breath  of  the  naked  sky 
Might  visit  thee  at  will.5 

He  sought  compensation  in  intellectual  pursuits,  Italian,  the 
reading  of  Beccaria  Dei  delitti  e  pene ,  in  writing  to  Hogg  and  re¬ 
calling  their  happy  days  at  Oxford.  He  sought  out  the  compan¬ 
ionship  of  his  friends  and  when  neither  compensations  nor  his 
usual  defense  mechanisms  enabled  him  to  forget,  laudanum  se¬ 
cured  for  a  moment  the  end  which  the  mechanism  of  the  mind 
failed  to  attain.  His  strong  drive  to  do  all  in  his  power  to  for¬ 
get  is  pictured  in  an  account  given  by  Peacock  of  a  visit  to 
Shelley  during  this  period  of  his  life. 

‘"His  eyes  were  bloodshot,  his  hair  and  dress  disordered.  He 
caught  up  a  bottle  of  laudanum,  and  said,  T  never  part  from 
this.’  He  added,  T  am  always  repeating  to  myself  your  lines 
from  Sophocles. 

Man’s  happiest  lot  is  not  to  be; 

And  when  we  tread  life's  thorny  steep 
Most  blest  are  they  who  earliest  free 
Descend  to  death’s  eternal  sleep.6 


5  Rossetti  ed.,  II,  pp.  148-149. 

6  Quoted  from  Dowden,  Vol.  I,  p.  433. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


5i 


He  had  already  met  Mary  Godwin  and  the  conflict  involving 
the  desertion  of  Harriet  was  going  on  within  him.  It  lasted  only 
a  few  weeks.  Soon  the  lure  of  Mary's  dark  eyes  became  the 
dominating  influence  in  his  life  and  compensated  him  entirely 
for  the  waning  of  his  love  for  Harriet. 

Upon  my  heart  thy  accents  sweet 
Of  peace  and  pity  fell,  like  dew 
On  flowers  half  dead;  thy  lips  did  meet 
Mine  tremblingly;  thy  dark  eyes  threw 
Their  soft  persuasion  on  my  brain, 

Charming  away  its  dreams  of  pain.7 

After  deserting  Harriet,  his  love  for  Mary  so  fully  satisfied 
him  that  he  seemed  for  a  time  supremely  happy.  He  lived  out 
his  plan  of  life  with  one  who  understood  him,  better  than  any 
other  human  being.  He  protested  against  tyranny  of  all  sorts  in 
his  poems.  He  enjoyed  intellectual  pursuits.  He  reveled  in  the 
glories  of  nature,  living  out  a  poet's  dream  with  nothing  to  do 
but  enjoy  himself  and  write  poetry. 

Leigh  Hunt  thus  describes  his  daily  routine  at  this  period: 

“He  rose  early  in  the  morning;  walked  and  read  before  break¬ 
fast  ;  took  that  meal  sparingly ;  wrote  and  studied  the  greater  part 
of  the  morning;  walked  and  read  again;  dined  on  vegetables  (for 
he  took  neither  meat  nor  wine) ;  conversed  with  his  friends,  to 
whom  his  house  was  ever  open;  again  walked  out;  and  usually 
finished  with  reading  to  his  wife  till  ten  o’clock  when  he  went  to 
bed."8 

To  this  work  he  seems  to  have  added  at  times  regular  visits  to 
the  poor. 

He  had  everything  a  poet  could  desire  and  still  he  was  not 
happy.  We  have  already  seen  that  at  the  time  of  his  tragic 
death  the  eyes  of  Mary  were  already  becoming  two  lessening 
points  of  light  gleaming  through  the  darkness. 

In  1820  (about  two  years  before  his  tragic  death)  he  felt  that 
love  itself  was  as  mortal  as  man. 

7  To  Mary  Woolstonecraft  Godwin.  Rossetti’s  ed.,  II,  p.  297. 

8  Quoted  by  Rossetti.  Memoir,  p.  xcvi. 


52  THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 

First  our  pleasures  die,  and  then 

Our  hopes,  and  then  our  fears :  and,  when 

These  are  dead,  the  debt  is  due, 

Dust  claims  dust — and  we  die  too. 

All  things  that  we  love  and  cherish, 

Like  ourselves,  must  fade  and  perish. 

Such  is  our  rude  mortal  lot : 

Love  itself  would,  did  they  not.9 

He  sought  compensation  then  in  his  friendship  for  Edward 
Williams. 


When  I  return  to  my  cold  home,  you  ask 
Why  I  am  not  as  I  have  lately  been? 

You  spoil  me  for  the  task 
Of  acting  a  forced  part  in  life’s  dull  scene, — 

Of  wearing  on  my  brow  the  idle  mask 
Of  author,  great  or  mean, 

In  the  world’s  carnival.  I  sought 
Peace  thus,  and  but  in  you  I  found  it  not. 

Perhaps  one  element  in  Shelley’s  final  discontent  was  a  homo¬ 
sexual  trend  existing  in  childhood  and  dormant  in  his  later  life 
but  rendering  impossible  a  complete  fixation  of  his  love  on  any 
woman. 

But  at  all  events  his  poem  entitled  A  Lament,  written  in  1821, 
indicates  that  he  had  lived  out  his  plan  of  life  and  found  it  want¬ 
ing,  that  all  compensation  was  crumbling  and  he  had  no  longer 
any  hope  for  the  future. 

O  World  !  O  life!  O  time! 

On  whose  last  steps  I  climb, 

Trembling  at  that  where  I  had  stood  before, — 

When  will  return  the  glory  of  your  prime? 

No  more — Oh  never  more! 

Out  of  the  day  and  night 
A  joy  has  taken  flight: 

Fresh  Spring,  and  Summer,  Autumn,  and  Winter  hoar, 
Move  my  faint  heart  with  grief, — but  with  delight 
No  more,  oh  never  more. 


9  Death.  Rossetti’s  ed.,  Vol.  II,  p.  332. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


53 


Such  then  were  the  compensations  of  Shelley.  They  were 
found  inadequate,  before  he  was  thirty,  when  the  crumbling  of 
his  plan  of  life  left  him  at  the  edge  of  a  desert  of  discontent 
which  perhaps  he  would  never  have  been  able  to  traverse.  Hope, 
at  all  events,  was  gone,  some  months  before  his  death  of  which 
he  had  a  strange  presentiment. 

Lilies  for  a  bridal  bed, 

Roses  for  a  matron’s  head, 

Violets  for  a  maiden  dead; 

Pansies  let  my  flowers  be; 

On  the  living  grave  I  bear 
Scatter  them  without  a  tear, 

Let  no  friend,  however  dear, 

Waste  a  hope,  a  fear,  for  me.10 

10  Remembrance.  Rossetti’s  ed.  II,  p.  274.  See  in  the  Appendix,  pp.  1002-3 
of  Ingpen’s  ed.  of  his  letters,  the  letter  of  transmission  of  this  poem  and  the 
one  to  Edw.  Williams.  They  indicate  that  he  was  not  less  depressed  when 
out  of  his  poetic  moods  than  when  in  them.  He  wanted  the  poems  kept 
secret  and  that  was  probably  because  they  revealed  the  hidden  trend  of  dis¬ 
content  with  which  he  was  struggling. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


Special  Traits  of  Character 

A  number  of  special  traits  of  character  manifest  themselves  in 
every  individual.  Each  trait  has  no  doubt  a  deep  signification 
though  we  do  not  know  at  present  what  this  hidden  meaning  may 
be.  It  is  quite  possible  that  several  such  traits  must  be  at  bottom 
all  one  and  the  same  thing,  that  is  named  differently  when  ap¬ 
plied  to  diverse  objects  or  manifests  itself  in  different  ways. 
The  study  of  character  will  not  make  great  progress  till  the  an¬ 
alysis  of  these  character  traits  has  to  some  extent  been  accom¬ 
plished.  When  that  is  done  the  problem  of  the  linkage  and  as¬ 
sociation  of  character  traits  may  be  undertaken  with  some  hope 
of  a  successful  solution.  As  a  preliminary  step  we  may  merely 
enumerate,  more  or  less  in  a  haphazard  fashion,  the  character 
traits  of  the  individuals  whom  we  study.  And  so  the  following 
traits  of  Shelley  s  character  are  presented  without  any  attempt 
at  analysis.  There  has  been  no  effort  to  make  the  list  exhaustive. 

Shelley's  imagined  type.  I  have  attempted  to  determine  Shel¬ 
ley’s  imaginal  type  by  counting  the  images  found  in  a  few 
samples  of  his  poetry  much  in  the  same  way  as  the  pathologist 
makes  a  differential  count  of  the  white  blood  corpuscles.  For 
this  purpose  I  chose  Alastor  and  the  6th  Canto  of  The  Revolt  of 
Islam  beginning  with  the  nineteenth  stanza.  Both  selections  re¬ 
fer  to  similar  situations. 

I  realize,  however,  that  it  is  much  more  difficult  to  pick  out 
types  of  images  than  forms  of  leucocytes.  My  own  images  are 
very  poor  and  I  had  to  read  slowly  to  make  the  images  come. 
I  may  have  missed  many  but  think  that  the  count  has  some  rela¬ 
tive  value.  Visual  images  are  particularly  hard  to  count  exactly 
and  one  must  use  his  judgment  in  deciding  whether  successive 
words  are  separate  images  or  all  part  of  one  and  the  same  picture. 
I  made  three  separate  counts  to  see  how  they  would  agree.  The 
agreement  indicates  that  the  relative  proportion  in  Shelley’s 

54 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  55 

imagery  is  not  a  matter  of  chance  but  is  expressive  of  his  typical 
flow  of  thought. 


Alastor 

1st  hundred 

Alastor 

2d  hundred 

The  Revolt 
of  Islam 

Total 

% 

Visual  . 

53 

55 

53 

161 

53/d 

Organic  . . . . 

18 

17 

1 7 

52 

i7lA 

Auditory  . . 
Tactual  & 

15 

17 

15 

47 

i5/d 

T emp.  . . . 

6 

4 

10 

20 

6/d 

Olfactory  .. 

4 

5 

3 

12 

4 

Kinaesthetic. 

4 

2 

1 

7 

2^ 

Taste  . 

0 

0 

1 

1 

Jd 

Total . 

100 

100 

100 

300 

100 

In  the  above  list  sight  is  underrated  because  of  the  difficulty 
of  counting  the  successive  images  in  a  complex.  Touch  is  over¬ 
rated  because  I  have  included  under  touch  such  phrases  as:  “to 
meet  her  panting  bosom/’  “folded  his  frame  in  her  dissolving 
arms,”  etc.  These  pertain  more  properly  to  the  organic.  Shel¬ 
ley  seldom  brings  out  the  fine  touch  qualities  such  as  soft,  smooth, 
rough,  etc.  When  they  do  appear  they  are  more  often,  in  my 
samples,  of  an  unpleasant  rather  than  a  pleasant  character.  Had 
doubtful  cases  been  excluded,  touch  would  have  ranked  below 
smell. 

On  the  other  hand  he  was  keenly  sensitive  to  the  organic,  e.g. 
gasping  breath,  shuddering  limbs,  tremulous  sobs,  breathless 
kisses,  thirsting  lips,  sinking  heart,  etc. 

Shelley  was  but  slightly  sensitive  to  the  pleasures  of  touch  if 
at  all.  Smell,  however,  is  mentioned  with  distinct  characteristics 
and  also  temperature,  e.g.  icy  caves. 

Of  taste  he  seems  to  have  little  appreciation.  This  perhaps 
prepared  the  way  for  his  becoming  a  sporadic  vegetarian  and  a 
total  abstainer.  Hogg  says  of  him  in  his  college  days  “he  could 
have  lived  on  bread  alone  without  repining”1  and  that  though  he 
enjoyed  sweets  “he  rarely  sought  for  them  or  provided  them  for 
himself.” 

Beautiful  images  of  sound  and  sight  abound  in  his  lines.  But 
his  keenest  joys  seem  to  have  come  from  vision.  His  descrip- 


1  Life  of  Shelley,  ch.  3,  p.  86. 


56 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


tion  of  Cythna  and  the  lady  of  Alastor’s  dream  are  mainly  in 
terms  of  vision.  Again  and  again  he  returns  to  the  beauty  of 
the  eyes. 

Shelleys  intellectual  endowments .  His  biographers  repeatedly 
speak  of  his  excellent  memory.  He  learned  so  easily  that  it 
was  not  necessary  for  him  to  work  hard.  He  did  not  study 
much  at  Sion  Hall  or  at  Eton;  but  at  Oxford  he  became  much 
interested  and  Hogg  tells  us  that  he  spent  sixteen  out  of  the 
twenty-four  hours  in  reading.  He  was  a  good  classical  stu¬ 
dent.  “A  pocket  edition  of  Plato,  of  Plutarch,  of  Euripides, 
without  interpretation  or  notes,  or  of  the  Septuagint,  was  his 
ordinary  companion;  and  he  read  the  text  straight  forward  for 
hours,  if  not  as  readily  as  an  English  author,  at  least  with  as 
much  facility  as  French,  Italian,  or  Spanish."2 

Shelley  was  no  empiricist.  He  was  the  very  opposite  of  Dar¬ 
win  and  would  have  to  be  classed  among  the  most  deficient  of 
observers. 

“He  was  able,  like  the  many,  to  distinguish  a  violet  from  a 
sunflower,  and  a  cauliflower  from  a  peony;  but  his  botanical 
knowledge  was  more  limited  than  that  of  the  least  skillful  of 
common  observers,  for  he  was  neglectful  of  flowers.  He  was 
incapable  of  distinguishing  the  delicate  distinctions  of  structure 
which  form  the  basis  of  the  beautiful  classification  of  modern 
botanists."3  In  this  respect  Shelley  resembled  Francis  Thomp¬ 
son. 

His  interest  in  chemistry  was  not  an  empirical  one  but  a  weird 
search  for  hidden  lore,  made  all  the  more  interesting,  because 
dabbling  in  fire  and  explosives  was  a  forbidden  sport. 

In  spite  of  Hogg,  Shelley  was  not  a  philosopher.  His  attempts 
at  philosophy  were  fragmentary  and  dictated  as  we  have  seen  by 
emotional  trends  and  hidden  drives. 

He  played  chess  but  was  not  a  good  hand  at  the  game.4 

Shelley s  emotional  life  is  characterized  by  a  remarkable  fickle- 

2  Hogg,  p.  85. 

3  Hogg,  p.  75. 

4  Rossetti,  Memoir,  p.  cxxx. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


57 


ness  in  love.  The  fading  of  his  love  for  Harriet  and  his  sudden 
infatuation  with  Mary  and  the  waning  of  his  love  after  only  a  few 
years  of  married  life  is  an  evidence  of  this  to  say  nothing  of  the 
incident  with  Emilia. 

He  loved  animals.  He  could  not  bear  to  see  them  cruelly 
treated.  He  depicts  this  trait  in  himself  in  describing  Alastor. 

He  would  linger  long 

In  lonesome  vales,  making  the  wild  his  home; 

Until  the  doves  and  squarrels  would  partake 
From  his  innocuous  hand  his  bloodless  food, 

Lured  by  the  gentle  meaning  of  his  looks. 

He  was  fond  of  children,  a  trait  which  according  to  Hogg, 
could  be  demonstrated  by  numerous  examples. 

Among  his  natural  virtues  was  a  spirit  of  generosity,  so  bound¬ 
less  and  unreasonable,  that  it  approached  a  vice.  He  gave  money 
when  he  could  not  afford  it;  gave  it  often  when  he  was  not 
asked.  This  is  only  another  example  of  how  reason  or  cold  cal¬ 
culating  motives  had  little  influence  on  his  conduct.  His  in¬ 
hibitions  were  poorly  developed ;  he  acted  on  the  spur  of  the  mo¬ 
ment,  once  knocking  a  man  down  who  disagreed  with  him. 

He  wanted  to  be  a  reformer  but  he  disliked  politics. 

“With  how  unconquerable  an  aversion  do  I  shrink  from  po¬ 
litical  articles  in  newspapers  and  reviews!  I  have  heard  people 
talk  politics  by  the  hour,  and  how  I  hated  it  and  them!  I  went 
with  my  father  several  times  to  the  House  of  Commons,  and 
what  creatures  did  I  see  there !  What  faces !  what  an  expression 
of  countenance !  what  wretched  beings  !"5 

Associated  with  his  hatred  of  politics  was  a  tendency  to  shrink 
from  human  society.  Thus  on  Aug.  16,  1821,  he  wrote  to  his 
wife : 

“My  greatest  content  would  be  to  utterly  desert  human  society. 
I  would  retire  with  you  and  our  child  to  a  solitary  island  in  the 
seas,  would  build  a  boat  and  shut  upon  my  retreat  the  flood 
gates  of  the  world.’'6 

5  Rossetti  quoted  from  Hogg.  Memoir,  p.  clvii. 

6  Letters  of  Shelley,  edited  by  Ingperi,  1914.  Vol.  II,  p.  905. 


58 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


This  was  the  precox  trend  in  Shelley’s  character  which  counter¬ 
acted  effectively  his  drive  to  reform  the  world  and  overthrow 
authority.  United  with  his  natural  gifts  it  made  over  the  would 
be  anarchist  into  a  poet  who,  instead  of  doing  anything  to  work 
a  change  in  the  order  of  things,  merely  dreamed  of  revolution 
and  revolt. 


CHAPTER  IX 


The  Shelley  Profile 

What  then  are  the  dominant  traits  that  outline  the  character 
of  Shelley?  What  lines  strike  one  most  in  his  intellectual  visage? 

They  are  first  of  all  the  precox  elements  of  negativism  and  de¬ 
fense. 

The  bold,  violent  protest  against  all  authority  rooted  uncon¬ 
sciously  in  the  hatred  of  his  father. 

The  defense  reaction  of  avoiding  the  realization  of  personal 
blame. 

The  drive  to  retirement  which  made  it  impossible  for  him  to 
do  anything  practical  towards  carrying  out  his  ideas  of  reform. 

The  craving  for  sympathy  which  lent  his  dominantly  precox 
disposition  an  hysterical  tone. 

His  poetical  rather  than  metaphysical  or  empirical  mental  en¬ 
dowments. 

His  visual-organic-auditory  type  of  imagery  with  its  poverty 
in  the  cruder  elements  of  touch  and  taste,  lending  no  doubt  the 
charm  of  refinement  to  his  general  disposition. 

The  fickleness  of  his  love  and  the  generosity  of  his  soul. 

These  are  the  dominant  traits  that  constitute  the  Shelley  pro¬ 
file  and  stand  out  prominently  in  his  life  and  writings. 


59 


CHAPTER  X 


Evaluation  of  Shelley’s  Plan  of  Life 

If  vve  look  at  Shelley’s  plan  of  life  from  the  point  of  view  of 
a  pragmatist  we  must  conclude  that  in  some  way  it  was  funda¬ 
mentally  inadequate.  For  a  plan  of  life,  to  be  successful,  must 
lead  to  peace  and  contentment  usque  ad  finetn  vitae .  Shelley’s 
mode  of  life  did  not  attain  this  result.  In  fact  it  would  seem 
that  when  he  died,  having  scarcely  attained  the  age  of  thirty, 
another  crisis  in  his  life  was  probably  impending.  At  least  there 
were  strong  indications  of  a  fundamental  discontent.  Nor  can 
we  take  the  pessimistic  view  that  all  the  world  is  discontented 
and  no  plan  of  life  can  bring  peace  and  happiness. 

If  one  pays  attention  to  the  newspaper  headlines,  or  the  cases 
that  roll  into  a  clinic,  or  that  demand  special  attention  in  the  con¬ 
fessional,  one  is  likely  to  get  the  impression  that  all  the  world 
is  miserable  and  discontented.  But  it  is  the  extreme  type  of 
case  that  makes  the  most  noise  in  the  world,  the  thousands  of 
happy  ones  afford  no  spicy  items  for  the  daily  press. 

In  a  questionnaire  sent  out  by  the  Bureau  of  Social  Hygiene 
of  New  York  City  to  a  thousand  married  women,  the  following 
report  was  given  on  the  item  of  happiness.1 


Absolutely,  Extremely,  Entirely,  Perfectly .  49 

Happy .  822 

Fairly,  Rather,  Not  Wholly,  Not  Particularly .  28 

Mixed,  Intermittently,  In  General,  etc .  37 

Unhappy  .  44 

Special  Cases  .  8 

Unanswered  .  12 


1000 

It  would  seem  from  this  investigation  that  there  is  no  warrant 
for  the  pessimistic  view  that  happiness  is  not  attainable. 

If  Shelley  did  not  attain  to  a  satisfactory  solution  of  life  it 
was  not  because  the  problem  is  insoluble,  but  because  there  was 
something  wrong  with  his  solution. 

1  The  Social  Hygiene  Bulletin,  1921,  VIII,  p.  11. 

60 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY 


61 


If  we  look  at  his  solution  to  discover  what  was  lacking  we  find 
one  possible  explanation  in  the  fact  that  it  was  dominantly  a  blind 
drive  for  self-satisfaction  in  an  object  of  sensuous  love.  There 
is  no  concept  of  the  accomplishment  of  any  task,  the  fulfilment 
of  a  mission  of  value  to  anyone  except  himself.  He  sought  peace 
and  contentment  in  human  love  and  found  it  not,  perhaps,  be¬ 
cause  he  always  sought  himself  and  never  another. 

True,  you  say,  but  did  he  not  plan  social  reform  and  the  bet¬ 
terment  of  the  race?  Was  he  not,  therefore,  interested  in  the 
welfare  of  others? 

Had  Shelley’s  plans  for  reform  been  dictated  by  a  pure  desire 
to  help  fallen  humanity,  they  would  have  been  a  factor  in  his 
life  that  might  have  changed  him  entirely  and  have  enabled 
him  to  live  more  than  thirty  years  without  experiencing  the 
grumblings  of  discontent. 

But  his  ideas  of  reformation  were  dictated  not  by  love,  but  by 
hatred.  They  flowed  from  his  father  complex.  He  did  not  want 
to  build  up,  but  to  tear  down.  So  that  the  love  of  mankind  was 
only  incidental  and  the  hatred  of  the  institutions  of  authority  in 
general  and  of  his  own  father  in  particular  was  the  essential  ele¬ 
ment,  not  in  a  drive  but  in  a  protest.  It  is  love  that  blesses  and 
not  hate,  a  truth  to  which  Shelley  himself  would  have  been  the 
first  to  subscribe.  He  did  not,  however,  know  himself  and  did  not 
realize  that  hate  and  not  love  dominated  his  plans  of  reform. 

Had  he  been  truly  led  by  gentle  charity  his  deeds  of  kindliness 
would  have  been  less  sporadic.  His  actions  would  have  been 
dictated  by  an  essential  element  in  his  plan  of  life  and  not  by  the 
emotional  appeal  of  an  incident.  Charity  would  have  drawn  him 
out  of  his  precox  inner  self.  It  would  have  led  him  forth  to 
action.  He  could  never  have  been  content,  as  he  was,  with 
dreaming  of  reforms  and  giving  expression  to  those  dreams,  not 
in  deeds,  but  in  poems. 

This  is  the  radical  sin  of  the  precox;  to  dream  much,  but  ac¬ 
complish  nothing.  It  was  characteristic  of  Shelley’s  life;  and  in 
this  he  gives  us  an  example,  not  to  follow,  but  to  avoid. 

Shelley’s  craving  for  sympathy  made  him  dishonest  with  him¬ 
self  so  that  he  could  not  see  his  own  faults  and  so  he  was  forced 


6 2 


THOMAS  VERNER  MOORE 


to  justify  his  failings  rather  than  to  correct  them.  So  intense  at 
times  was  this  craving  that  it  led  to  delusions  of  persecution, 
fabrications  without  evidence. 

Shelley's  father-complex  led  to  his  protest  and  rebellion  against 
authority.  It  made  him  cast  off  the  principles  of  the  common 
code  of  morals  and  so  he  was  able  to  live  as  he  pleased  without 
let  or  hindrance  from  the  principles  of  morality.  And  still  he  did 
not  attain  to  happiness,  for  vanity  of  vanities  and  all  is  vanity, 
and  there  is  no  consolation  for  the  human  heart,  nor  hope  of 
peace,  nor  place  of  rest,  nor  haven  from  the  storm  of  life,  except 
in  the  bosom  of  the  eternal  principles  of  right  and  wrong,  and  in 
the  accomplishment  of  what  is  worth  while  in  the  sight  of  God 
and  man. 


